dmunger | May 1, 2008One of the amazing things about learning language is that children rarely hear language sounds in ideal acoustic environments. Maybe other people are talking in the background, or the dishwasher is running, or the TV is on. Yet somehow children they learn words just the same. By the time we're adults, we've become experts at filtering out irrelevant sounds and patching together meaning out of the cacophony of everyday life.
As one example, listen to this short clip of me saying the word "dinosaur" three times.
I edited the "s" sound out of the first "dinosaur," so you can clearly hear me…
dmunger | April 30, 2008The man behind the amazing Contrast Asynchrony illusion has started a blog! Arthur Shapiro tells me he has a backlog of literally thousands of illusions. He promises to offer a new illusion every week, along with an explanation of the science behind it. Here's a preview of this week's illusion:
For an explanation of how it works, you'll have to visit Shapiro's blog, Illusion Sciences. There are already three illusions posted, with plenty more to come.
Arthur Shapiro is a world-class illusion designer and psychologist whose illusions have won the most prestigious awards in the field. Two…
dmunger | April 29, 2008Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa.
But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? Is learning to recognize other races as difficult as recognizing any new category…
dmunger | April 28, 2008Thank you for "choosing" to read Encephalon #44 here at Cognitive Daily. Every two weeks, Encephalon "selects" the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere, giving readers the chance to "decide" which ones they'd like to investigate further.
Unfortunately for all those involved, those "decisions" very likely weren't carried out through the "deciders'" own volition, but instead were precipitated through the confluence of genetic inheritance and circumstance.
Consider this post from Neuroanthropology, for example, which dissects a forthcoming publication in Nature…
dmunger | April 27, 2008CogDaily will be hosting Encephalon tomorrow. There's still time to make your submissions -- just send an email to encephalon.host -- @ -- gmail -- . -- com (remove dashes).
We should be able to include any submissions received before 9 a.m. tomorrow.
dmunger | April 26, 2008There's a fun little test over at the BBC: Spot the fake smile (via Green Ideas).
Try to spot the difference between fake smiles and real smiles! I got 17 out of 20. It helps to understand the research about authentic smiles.
Update: Now I'm curious. I wonder if our readers are really that good, or if people are only posting their scores when they do well, so -- I've added a poll, below the fold.
dmunger | April 25, 2008Last week's Casual Friday study was all about money. The basic question was simply what it means to be rich -- how much income and net worth does it take before you consider someone to be wealthy? We received over 1,000 responses. Perhaps our most interesting finding was simply the diversity of opinions about what "rich" is. Here's how the responses broke down:
While most responses fell between $100 thousand per year and $500 thousand per year, 95 people said an income of below $100 thousand was still "rich," and 75 people said it would take $1 million or more per year to be wealthy!…
dmunger | April 24, 2008Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even to torture animals. Over 85 percent of video games include violence.
When these statistics are combined with the results of studies showing that aggressive attitudes and even actions can be increased after playing violent games for as little as 20 minutes, it's possible that we have a major problem on our hands.
Another potential problem of video…
dmunger | April 24, 2008ScienceBlogs.de, our German counterpart, is featuring an English-language interview with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel:
Pertinent to Tuesday's post, he discusses free will, and also drug treatment for behavior disorders, the unification of the sciences, and Sigmund Freud.
dmunger | April 22, 2008Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it's a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every "decision" we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual's control.
Yet others have argued that a belief in free will is essential to morality. If we don't actually have any control over the decisions we make, how can we be held accountable for them? Several studies have suggested that when kids believe their…
dmunger | April 21, 2008I know CogDaily is supposed to be a psychology web site, but sometimes, you have a question you simply must know the answer to.
I frequently need to boil a mug of water, and I've often wondered what the most energy-efficient method is. Is it the microwave, or the good-old-fashioned teakettle on the cooktop? In these days of global warming, it's an important question. So I finally decided to do the experiment.
Method and results:
I filled a ScienceBlogs mug with 300 ml tap water at 62° Fahrenheit.
Then I heated it at 30-second intervals in a 900-watt GE microwave oven.
Results are…
dmunger | April 18, 2008After spending all last weekend preparing our income tax return, I must have money on my mind. So this week's Casual Fridays study is about money. I don't want to tell you much more about it before you participate in the survey because it may affect the results, so just go ahead and click.
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, April 24 to respond. Then don't forget to check back on Friday, April 25 for the results!
I'm not going to close…
dmunger | April 17, 2008If you saw a headline like this one in your local newspaper, you might first think it's some type of info-tisement sponsored by the floral industry. You'd probably be right, too. So what is this headline doing in Cognitive Daily? We've found a study to support the notion that flowers actually induce real positive emotions.
Was it paid for by the floral industry? Yes, it was. Does that mean it's bad research? Not necessarily. A team led by Jeannette Haviliand-Jones has conducted an impressive set of three experiments, each of which contributes to the idea that giving someone flowers improves…
dmunger | April 16, 2008The 43rd Encephalon is available over at GNIF Brain Blogger. It's a fantastic collection of the best psychology and neuroscience blogging from the past two weeks.
The next Encephalon will be hosted right here at Cognitive Daily on April 28. To submit your posts about psychology and neuroscience, email encephalon {dot} host [at] gmail {dot} com.
dmunger | April 15, 2008Clicking on the link below will bring up an image in a new window (you may need to disable pop-up blockers to do this). The picture contains five rows of asterisks. Your job is to count them as quickly as possible. Try using your finger to point and help keep track.
View image
Now try the same task again, only this time, keep your hands flat on the table while you count.
View image
If you're like most people, this second task was a little more difficult for you. It's not that you need to use your finger to help you count, it just seems to help things along a bit. When you weren't using your…
dmunger | April 14, 2008How often do you take time to reflect on the things you're grateful for? Once a month? Once a week, at church, perhaps? Maybe you say "grace" at mealtime every day. But even prayers that do express gratefulness, such as a traditional mealtime prayer, are often expressed by rote. Growing up, my family wasn't very religious, but when we had dinner with family or friends, we'd usually say grace. I was probably well into my teens before I understood what "blessusolordforthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthybounty" actually meant.
While many would agree that "counting your blessings" is a…
dmunger | April 11, 2008Sorry, no Casual Friday this week -- I'm frantically finishing up our tax returns.
We actually did a Casual Friday about tax procrastination a couple years back though, so if you need a Casual Friday fix, check that one out:
Casual Fridays: Dave FINALLY finishes analyzing the procrastination data.
dmunger | April 8, 2008In our little college town, one of the most popular fitness trends over the past few years has been yoga. Friends and acquaintances often suggest we join them in their favorite class, claiming not only that we'll get stronger and more flexible, but that we'll feel better about ourselves.
But Greta and I both have fitness routines that work well for us. I like to go for a morning run, I bike, and I play soccer, and Greta not only walks for 30 minutes on the treadmill every day, she also walks to and from work, 1.3 miles each way. Despite our assurances that we enjoy these things, devout yoga…
dmunger | April 7, 2008The fact that infants are able to learn language without any help from adults can sometimes seem almost miraculous. Not only do children learn to speak and understand language completely on their own, active teaching of language skills seems to make almost no difference in their ability to talk.
One of the first difficulties when learning a language solely from listening to spoken language is determining where one word ends and the next one begins. Native speakers of a language typically leave no audible space between words at all. Even "motherese" doesn't leave any space between words -- if…
dmunger | April 4, 2008Do you recognize this man? If so, you're not alone: over three-quarters of our readers were able to spot Richard Dawkins as he flashed by in a QuickTime video. So does this mean that the gatekeepers at Expelled who ejected the much-less-famous PZ Myers but not Dawkins two weeks ago are a bunch of incompetent oafs?
Not necessarily.
Many of those participating in the study came via Greg Laden's post on the subject, which included jumbo-sized pictures of both Dawkins and Myers. Maybe they had an unfair advantage over the harried gatekeepers for Expelled, who didn't have photos as a reference --…