dmunger | May 28, 2008Inspired by this post, we've decided to devote a week to the analysis of studies from the history of psychology.
Today we consider the work of Millicent Washburn Shinn, one of the first women admitted to the University of California, Berkeley (in 1874), and the first to earn a Ph.D. there. In 1890, her niece Ruth was born, and Shinn spent hours carefully observing the child's every behavior. This "large mass of data" became the basis for a book that was welcomed by the scholars of the day, The Biography of a Baby, which, while not the first of its kind, certainly was one of the most thorough…
dmunger | May 28, 2008The biweekly neuroscience / psychology carnival Encephalon is now live over at the Neurocritic. There are tons of great posts but one of my favorites has to be this one: Would you vaccinate your kids against drugs?
dmunger | May 27, 2008Inspired by this post, we've decided to devote a week to the analysis of studies from the history of psychology.
Today's post discusses a small fraction of the work done by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in the study of memory. Ebbinghaus spent two excruciating year-long periods (1879-80 and 1883-84) painstakingly studying the limits of human memory, using just one experimental participant -- himself.
Ebbinghaus recognized early on that memories were inextricably bound up in their content. It's a very different thing to memorize a poem and an essay, even if the two are the identical length.…
dmunger | May 24, 2008Quick, solve this problem
3 + 5 * 7 = ?
If you still recall high school algebra, you'll remember that you should be doing the multiplication problem first. So the answer would be 35 + 3, or 38. But if you just punch the numbers into your calculator (or if you haven't had occasion to do algebra since the ninth grade), you might do the addition problem first and come up with a different answer.
But even when people are reminded about the algebraic solution to the problem, when the numbers are grouped together a little differently, it has a significant impact on whether they're able to solve the…
dmunger | May 24, 2008Negative stereotypes about Blacks in the U.S. have declined dramatically since the 1930s -- practically no White person to will say that Blacks are lazy, or superstitious, or many other stereotypes, when these views were common 80 years ago.
Yet huge racial disparities still exist infant mortality, unemployment, and poverty are found more than twice as often among Blacks than Whites, and these numbers haven't changed since the 1960s.
In John Dovidio's talk, "Racism Among the Well-Intentioned, he argued that most Whites who say they're not biased, believe they are not biased. Yet at the same…
dmunger | May 23, 2008Just a few quick notes about Michael Frese's talk, "Learning from Errors by Individuals and Organizations."
Frese gives a rule: "You make about 3-4 errors per hour no matter what you're doing."
If errors are so ubiquitous, maybe it makes more sense to train people to deal with errors, rather than to try to flush out every possible error. Frese and others have studied this phenomenon in the lab. They found that error management actually led to improved performance on computer training tasks: if you are trained to expect errors and deal with them, you do better on the task. There are limits to…
dmunger | May 23, 2008This morning I attended a session on the Science of Learning, and heard a bunch of great talks.
I was especially impressed by "There's Nothing so Practical as a Good Theory," by Robert Seigler.
Siegler discussed his work with children's learning of the number line. As children get older, they develop better and better representations of numbers -- this is research we've discussed on Cognitive Daily.
These results correlate significantly with math achievement test scores -- kids who have better representations of numbers score better on the tests.
So what causes math ability in these kids?…
dmunger | May 22, 2008As I write this, Greta and I are on the plane to Chicago, to attend this year's Association for Psychological Science convention. We'll be participating in a symposium on Sunday, talking about Cognitive Daily and ResearchBlogging.org, but until then, we'll be attending other sessions and reporting intermittently here on CogDaily. We won't be "liveblogging" every session we attend, just giving a few thoughts and impressions of what we see and hear in Chicago.
If you're attending the convention, maybe we'll see you there. If not, you'll get some sense of what it's like by checking out CogDaily…
gmunger | May 21, 2008Cognitive Daily is a reflection of my teaching. In fact, one of the ways I pick articles for Dave to discuss on the blog is to pass along articles I've used in class. It has occurred to us that our Research categories (like Movement and Exercise, or Video Games / Technology) are not the most helpful for teachers seeking new examples, and so I've indexed some of the blog posts using categories that are more familiar to general and cognitive psychology teachers.
You'll find it under the new tab Teaching Index, where topics are listed in the order many psychology textbooks follow (biological…
dmunger | May 20, 2008How do you raise "good kids"? It's one of the questions that plagues parents even before their kids are born. Although everyone's child can't be above average, we all want our kids to be nice to others, to "get along" in the world. But kids don't necessarily cooperate. Babies scream, pull hair, defecate and urinate where they're not supposed to. Toddlers throw fits in the middle of supermarkets, and older children lie to us and steal from each other. How do we keep them from becoming delinquents, convicts, or worse?
Unfortunately a lot of the research suggests that parents don't actually have…
dmunger | May 16, 2008Greta and I have very different approaches to technology. I like to read all the latest technology news and learn about new products; she just buys the products she needs. That's not to say she doesn't like technology: she has a lab full of computers and uses them extensively in her research. We've also found that we have different quirks about how we use technology, like how we organize our desks and who we'll let use our stuff.
That got us wondering if there are any patterns to people's technology quirks. Are technophiles less likely to let other people play with their toys, for example? So…
dmunger | May 15, 2008This morning I went into the darkest room in our house (the kids' bathroom), closed the door, and turned off the lights for 5 minutes. There was enough light coming in through the crack in the door that after a minute or two I could begin to make out shapes in the room: A towel rack, the shower curtain. My eyes had adapted to the dark condition. Then I closed my right eye and covered it with my hand. I turned the lights back on, for a minute, until my left eye had adapted to the light. Then I turned the lights off.
I could still see the towel rack and shower curtain with my right eye, which…
dmunger | May 13, 2008Jim was an early, confident walker. Greta likes to say that he didn't learn to walk, he went straight to running. By the time he was about 16 months old, he could already outrun his already-pregnant mother.
Nora, on the other hand, was a late, tentative walker. She took her first steps at around 12 months, and still wasn't very confident as a walker at 18 months. In this photo, at 17 months, she still clings to their toy kitchen set for balance.
But I've just finished reading a fascinating study suggesting that at 14 months, when both of them were walking -- Jim with confidence, and Nora…
dmunger | May 12, 2008We're pretty good at remembering objects in a complex scene. We can even remember those objects when we move to a different location. However, the research so far has found that memory for the original view is a little better than memory when we've moved to a different location. Much of that research, however, has focused on relatively complex movements: Viewers are asked to remember an array of objects viewed from one side of a room, then are transported to a different part of the room and asked to decide whether the objects are arranged in the same pattern (actually, they're sitting at a…
dmunger | May 10, 2008Things got a little crazy yesterday, with Greta headed off to VSS and the kids needing to be at three different places at once, so I'm presenting this week's Casual Friday results on Saturday.
Last week we asked our readers who their most important mentors were. We didn't mention it at the time, but the survey was inspired by the headlines that week about Barack Obama's pastor's seemingly unpatriotic sermons, and how those sermons reflected on Obama. Do pastors really have a huge influence on people's lives? Can we actually evaluate a presidential candidate based on something his pastor says…
dmunger | May 8, 2008Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.
How much is Anton to blame for the accident? If you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe you'd give him a 7. After all, he was just trying to do something special for his parents.
But what if instead of hiding an anniversary present, Anton was rushing…
dmunger | May 7, 2008Ask almost anyone whether willfully deceiving another person -- lying -- is wrong, and they'll say it is. But probe a little deeper and most people will say there are some instances where lying is okay: lying to prevent a crime or an injustice is acceptable, just not lying for personal gain. Parents teach their kids that lying is wrong, and punish them for telling lies.
I can still remember the shock when my parents "lied" about my sixth birthday (which was a day away) at an ice-cream parlor so I could get a free sundae. But eventually, at some point, most American kids end up telling lies to…
dmunger | May 5, 2008If you've had a lot of musical training, you can probably tell the difference between a major and minor key. If you haven't had much training, even after having the difference explained to you, you're still not likely to be able to make that determination. Listen the following clip. It plays the same melody in a major and a minor key. Can you tell which is which?
But if the question is phrased differently, even non-musicians can reliably tell the difference: When listeners are told that some music (which happens to be in a major key) sounds "happy" and other music (in a minor key) sounds "…
dmunger | May 5, 2008Last week's post on perceptual restoration in toddlers brought a lot of speculation from commenters. To answer some of the questions, I thought I'd elaborate a bit here on the phenomenon and how I created the demo.
First, here's the original recording again, with me saying "dinosaur" three times:
In the first case, I edited out the "s" sound, and everyone with normal hearing can hear that. The last "dinosaur" is complete. Did I edit out the "s" in the middle dinosaur?
Most adults believe they hear the "s" sound in cases like this, even if the sound has been edited out: the perceptual system…
dmunger | May 2, 2008This week's Casual Friday is about mentors. We're curious who constitutes the most important influence on our readers, and whether we can identify any patterns in the results. So we've created a brief study that we hope will answer our questions. Simple as that.
Click here to participate
There are just a few questions, so the survey should only take a couple minutes to complete. There is no limit on the number of respondents. You have until Thursday, May 8 to respond. Then don't forget to check back on Friday, May 9 for the results!