dmunger | February 11, 2009How do you decide how dangerous a sex-offender is? Certainly all cases of sexual assault are appalling, but clearly some incidents are worse than others. In some places, teenagers who photograph themselves naked and send the pictures to their friends can be prosecuted as purveyors of child-pornography. While we may want to intervene in these cases, surely the action shouldn't be as drastic as when we're dealing with an adult who's a serial child rapist.
There are miles of gray area between these two extremes, and psychologists are often called on to make the tough judgment of how dangerous a…
dmunger | February 10, 2009A couple hours ago I posted a quick poll, in what might be construed as an unbiased fashion. I simply asked respondents for their sexual orientation, offering a wide array of choices ranging from "straight" to "mostly gay" to "gay" to "other."
In fact, my poll was biased -- not because the question itself was slanted, but because of the way respondents were recruited: I titled the post "Are you homosexual?" Potential respondents who are homosexual or who don't have traditional sexual preferences are more likely to be interested in the question, and therefore more likely to respond. How do I…
dmunger | February 10, 2009I'm having a dispute with a reader in an online forum. Let's settle it here with a quick, private poll:
What is your sexual orientation? ( surveys)
Trust me, this is related to psychology.
dmunger | February 9, 2009One of stand-up comic George Carlin's most famous routines was the seven words you can't say on TV (obviously, not safe for work). He repeated the words over and over, and it was hilarious -- especially back in the days before most people had cable. These days we've become desensitized to those words, and it's hardly surprising any more to see them laced into casual conversation.
Or is it?
One test of our ability to ignore words is rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP. In RSVP, you're shown a rapid sequence of words or images -- one about every tenth of a second. Your job is to pick out…
dmunger | February 7, 2009Last week's Casual Fridays study started out innocently enough: A contact on Twitter asked if most women would prefer fresh fruit or chocolates as a romantic gift. That's a fascinating question, I said -- maybe even interesting enough to merit study on Casual Friday. With Valentine's Day coming up, it might be a valuable service to our readers, preventing them from making a big mistake on the big day.
But once we're asking, I figured, why not ask about a few other possible gifts, like jewelry or perfume. And maybe we should ask about sexy lingerie and sex toys, just to make things more…
dmunger | February 6, 2009Sorry, this week's Casual Friday results won't be ready until tomorrow. There's lots of interesting data, and I want to make sure I do it justice.
dmunger | February 5, 2009Have you seen this "illusion" before?
The arrangement of the pacman shapes leads you to perceive rectangles, which are actually just empty spaces between the pacmen (that's a technical term -- it's in a journal article, so it must science!). Technically the rectangles are called "Kanizsa-type subjective contours," because while we perceive rectangles, there aren't actually rectangles there. It's a powerful effect, and once you see the shapes, it's difficult to look at the picture without perceiving them. Here's the identical figure with the pacmen rotated in random directions:
See? No…
dmunger | February 3, 2009You may have heard of the Stroop effect, and you may have even seen it demonstrated. But can the Stroop effect itself be manipulated? This short demo may show that it can.
In case you're not familiar with the effect, it occurs when you try to say the color a word is printed in, while the word itself names a color (so if you see "RED" you should say "green.") Try it with these short lists. Remember, say the color the word is PRINTED in, not the color named by the word.
Which column was most difficult? Let's make this a poll:
Which column was the most difficult? ( surveys)
The basic Stroop…
dmunger | January 30, 2009Valentines' Day is coming up in just a few weeks, so we thought we'd help our readers prepare by assessing the romance level of a few common gifts they might consider getting for their significant others.
I've noticed that there's often a fine line between a romantic gift and a disappointing downer. Does a box of chocolates signal true love or the fact that you've given up on your lover ever having a perfect figure? Is a cooking a romantic dinner an event in itself or just a way to guilt your date into "putting out" later on? What gift strikes the right balance? Maybe we can determine the…
dmunger | January 29, 2009Some of the things psychologists ask their research subjects to do are really rather annoying. I'm not talking about Milgram-esque studies where people confront their inner demons, I'm talking about much more pedestrian stuff. This movie, for example, gives you a small taste of the Sustained Attention to Response Test (SART). A series of numbers will flash by, about 1 per second. While you watch, tap your finger on your desk for each number except the number 4. Give it a whirl:
In some ways, it's a completely mindless task, but you have to keep paying attention or you'll end up tapping when…
dmunger | January 28, 2009Take a look at this graph showing population distribution by county in a fictional U.S. state:
How do you read such a graph? Is this the ideal way to depict this sort of information? If you wanted to know which part of the state was most populous, how would you go about figuring it out? Researchers have developed conflicting models to explain how it's done. One model suggests that people reading this kind of graph must cycle between the different parts in order to understand it. This makes some sense: to answer our question about population, you'd have to look back and forth between the…
dmunger | January 26, 2009Two years ago, we linked to a post about an ABC news program that claimed to have replicated Stanley Milgram's controversial experiments from the 1960s and 70s about obedience to authority. The original study tricked unwitting paid study participants into believing that they had administered potentially deadly shocks at the bidding of an experimenter. The cover was a "learning and memory experiment," allegedly designed to see if administering shocks would improve people's ability to memorize a list of words.
The shocks progressively escalated from 15 volts ("Slight Shock") to 450 volts ("…
dmunger | January 25, 2009Today's Slashdot poll covers some of the same territory as this week's Casual Fridays study. Their poll asks "How Many Hours Of Work Do You Do Per Workday?" We asked two questions that get at the same concept: How much time to you spend at work per day, and how much of that time do you spend doing non-work activities. So how do CogDaily readers compare to Slashdotters? Not very well (or very well, depending on your perspective):
It appears that Slashdot readers work much harder than CogDaily readers. Could that really be true? Or is it just an artifact of the way the question was asked? The…
dmunger | January 23, 2009Last week's Casual Fridays study was supposed to be about distractions and distractibility. Many of us struggle to keep our minds on work when the whole wide internet is available to entertain and inform us. So I wondered: Are people who are more easily distracted by the temptations of the internet actually better-informed? Do they know more about current events, tempted as they are by the incessant flow of news update not just hour by hour, but minute by minute?
The answer: not really. We asked respondents several questions about how easily distracted they were, and how much time they spend…
dmunger | January 22, 2009What are we looking at when we recognize faces? The shapes of of the individual components of the face -- eyes, nose, mouth? Or are we recognizing the larger patterns of how those parts relate to one another -- the distance between the eyes, the position of the mouth relative to the nose? We're actually probably doing some of each, with those configural patterns playing a slightly more important role.
But this raises an important question for perception researchers, because recognizing details and recognizing overall patterns utilize two different components of the visual system. Researchers…
dmunger | January 21, 2009There's lots of evidence that most TV isn't beneficial to toddlers, and it may even be harmful. But can't kids learn from TV too? Isn't that supposed to be what shows like Teletubbies, Barney, and Sesame street are all about? For older children, three and above, it does seem to be true that some learning can occur, but for two-year-olds and younger, the evidence tells a different story.
Few studies have shown any evidence that two-year-olds can learn from TV anywhere near as well as they learn from real-world experiences. While they clearly can distinguish between nonsense programming and…
dmunger | January 16, 2009One of my most difficult challenges as I work at home on Cognitive Daily and other projects is to keep focused on the task at hand. The internet, with its myriad distractions, is just a click away. It used to be that I could just head to a coffee shop with my laptop to get away from the internet, but now even that refuge is gone: My home internet service provider now offers free access from most coffee shops.
I've had to discover new ways to remove myself from the distraction of the internet. I'm often surprised when the latest "convenient" device is unveiled allowing unprecedented internet…
dmunger | January 15, 2009In 2007 I received a really cool Christmas present that I still haven't used. It's a kit to help identify the various components of the aroma in a glass of wine. I haven't used it because I wanted to wait for the right occasion -- say, a party with some of my wine-loving friends. But I've also been secretly skeptical whether it would really help. The kit has tiny vials that are supposed to represent individual aromas: "oak," "hazelnut," "coffee," "cherry," and so on. What does identifying an aroma have to do with deciding whether you like a glass of wine?
As it turns out, more than you might…
dmunger | January 14, 2009Can you tell if these two faces are the same or different?
How about these?
Or these?
If you're like most adults, it will be easier for you to identify different adult faces compared to the infant faces in the second example, and even the small children's faces in the third example.
This makes some sense, since most people don't spend much time around a wide variety of infants. Even a new parent typically only sees one or two infants at a time. The infants you see out in public are usually wrapped up and often are difficult to see. Most of us see more children than babies, but unless…
dmunger | January 12, 2009Take a look at this video made by fellow ScienceBlogger Dr. Isis. She's talking with her son, a toddler who adorably mimics her as she says very complicated words such as "Adventures in Ethics and Science" and "Wackaloon" (but sadly, not "Cognitive Daily"):
It's cute, but it's difficult to say whether Dr. Isis is really talking with her child. The difficulty babies have pronouncing words has led many parents to suspect they might be able to communicate better with their children using hand signs.
Last week we talked about a study suggesting that teaching babies even a few signs like those…