dmunger | October 21, 2005I'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 you just don't get much sense of the dizzying precipice she's standing on the edge of.
Later that summer, on Lake Powell, Utah, I finally managed to get a shot that conveyed some drama:
But even this shot doesn't really show the paralyzing terror Nora felt as she peered over the 100-foot drop-off…
dmunger | October 20, 2005If 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 a pair that makes the world appear shifted about ten degrees to one side—so what was directly in front of your victim now appears ten degrees to the left (or right, depending on the particular pair of glasses). The best volunteers are athletes—quarterbacks or pitchers. Suppose the starting softball…
dmunger | October 18, 2005When 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. Consider "locus of control" research (whether individuals blame problems or positive aspects of their relationships on chance/the actions of others, or on their own attitudes and actions). There have been dozens of studies on locus of control and marriage, but only two focusing on friendships, both…
dmunger | October 13, 2005Dozens 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 life. But James Annesi noted that most of these studies were implemented the same way: participants agree to a preset program of exercise, carefully controlled and monitored by experimenters. Might the psychological benefits only be an artifact of all the attention they were getting? It's possible,…
dmunger | October 12, 2005When 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 instead, he said he didn't blame the police for their actions. He could understand why they might have suspected he was a threat.
According to a study by Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet, Thomas Ludwig, and Kelly Vander Laan, what he did wasn't just a nice thing to do, it may also have been good for his…
dmunger | October 10, 2005This 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 benign shadow on the road; it's deciding whether that dark patch ahead is open roadway or deep water. These things are so easy for humans that we take them for granted, yet for a machine it's a task literally in its infancy.
By the time a child is 2, it can easily tell the difference between a…
dmunger | October 6, 2005Modern 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 they do. But what about other cultures? The folk tradition in Vietnam attributes disease to evil spirits and magic spells. As modern medicine now permeates nearly all cultures, do cultures such as Vietnam's similarly modify their understanding of the relationship between magic and medicine?
Simone…
dmunger | October 5, 2005The 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 park in which it sits. So, when we're confronted with such a massive landmark, do we use it to organize the surrounding area as well? Several studies have shown that we do pay attention to the surroundings of objects in order to remember their location. If we memorize the locations of a number of…
dmunger | October 3, 2005It often doesn't take much to make an eyewitness to a crime change her or his story. While Mafia hardball tactics for intimidating witnesses make the headlines, just seeing or hearing a different version of the "facts" can be enough. One key (as we've discussed before) is remembering the context for an event. If we can successfully recall that we personally witnessed one version of the story as it occurred last Thursday, then we're more likely to realize that it's different from the article we read in the newspaper the next day. If we don't recall the context of either the original version…
dmunger | September 30, 2005As early as 2002, 60 percent of the total Japanese population (this includes infants, the elderly, and the infirm) subscribed to a cell phone service. Though the phones are banned in public schools, parents were buying them for their kids anyway—mainly, they said, to control their behavior and build closer bonds. Naturally, the kids soon figured out that they were best used to call and send text messages to their friends. As kids became more attached to their cell phones, parents became concerned that the kids were substituting them for face-to-face relationships.
With these concerns in mind…
dmunger | September 28, 2005There are two different ways we might navigate from place to place: we either remember landmarks along the way, or we note how far we go in each direction, and what turns we've made along the way. The landmark system doesn't work very well in nondescript landscapes or in the dark, and the second system—which mariners term "dead reckoning," is susceptible to increasing errors as the distance we travel increases. So in day-to-day life, walking or driving around town, which method do we use?
A team led by Florence Gaunet explored this issue using a driving simulator. The participants in the…
dmunger | September 27, 2005All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it.
In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical differences between the eyes of many women and those of most men. "Normal" color vision is possible because we have…
dmunger | September 26, 2005Gender and racial differences in standardized test scores have received a lot of coverage in the popular press. An article in yesterday's New York Times discussed how simply combining populations with different economic status can result in increased test scores—apparently just being around kids with different educational expectations can have an impact on performance.
We've talked here about research which indicates that simply reminding test-takers of stereotypes about their gender or racial group can impact their performance. But these tests are typically conducted on adults. Do children…
dmunger | September 22, 2005There is considerable evidence that using a cell phone impairs driving ability. The research has even reached the popular consciousness: hosts of radio call-in shows ask cell-phone callers to pull over before making their comments; drivers give wide berths to people who are obviously talking while they drive.
All this knowledge begs the question: If drivers are aware of the dangers of cell phone use, can they compensate for their weaknesses and effectively negate any problems from driving with a phone? Mary Lesch and Peter Hancock had been part of a 2003 team that had found drivers reacted…
dmunger | September 21, 2005We know that "average" faces are judged to be more attractive than the faces of the individuals making up the average. But this doesn't tell us what the mechanism for judging attractiveness is. Do we judge faces to be attractive because they are potential mates, or is there some other reason for perceiving attractiveness?
Jamin Halberstadt and Gillian Rhodes came up with a novel way to try to answer that question: instead of faces, they asked participants to rate other things. If we rate average birds as more attractive than actual examples of birds, then this could suggest that we have a…
dmunger | September 15, 2005Music can be used to convey a range of emotion, from sadness to happiness, from anger to fear. We use music to help fall asleep at night, and to wake up in the morning. Its effect on our mood may be enough to improve our performance on a range of intellectual tasks. But where do these effects come from? Are we born with an association between music and emotion, or does it develop as we grow older?
Studies have found some evidence for an appreciation of music even in infants. Babies as young as 9 months old prefer musical scales to monotonic scales—the notes in the western musical scale do not…
dmunger | September 13, 2005Click on the image below to be taken to a quicktime movie showing 9 different faces. When the movie is finished playing, drag the slider back and forth to pick the face you think is the most attractive.
The faces are composite images—"average" faces made by morphing together 48 different photos. Previous research has shown that people typically perceive average faces as more beautiful than unusual faces (and here we've written about how easy it is to change our conception of "average"). But what about people from different racial groups? Would a Caucasian perceive an "average" South Asian…
dmunger | September 12, 2005My favorite bike shop has a photo of bicyclists lighting up cigarettes for each other as they rode along during a 1920s stage of the Tour de France. After getting over our astonishment that they can actually manage to light cigarettes without even getting off their bikes, we look at the photo today and think "how could those riders not know what those cigarettes were doing to their lungs?"
Surely today's athletes know that using drugs ranging from nicotine to alcohol to cocaine can seriously impair their ability to perform in competition, don't they? Supporters of scholastic athletics point…
dmunger | September 9, 2005Taste is a notoriously difficult sense to study. My son Jim can't stand baked potatoes, but I can't get enough of them. I don't like watermelon, but the rest of my family gobbles it up. Even more perplexingly, I do like watermelon candy. With all the individual differences in taste, how can scientists learn anything specific about how the sense works?
The difficulties in taste study are compounded by the fact that taste is intimately associated with the sense of smell. Every kid knows to plug his nose when trying a food he or she doesn't like. Researchers must be constantly aware that…
dmunger | September 8, 2005One of our missions at Cognitive Daily has always been to get our message about the science of psychology out to as large and diverse an audience as possible. So far, the message has been passed along mainly by the Internet equivalent of word of mouth—blogs—and we've been amazed at the number of people who've taken the time to read and comment on our articles. And though Cognitive Daily has now had over 80,000 visitors, we'd like to extend our message even further.
So naturally, we were thrilled when Mike Rundle of the 9rules Network invited us to join. 9rules is a consortium of dozens of…