dmunger | March 3, 2008Of Two Minds, the much-anticipated merger of Steve Higgins' Omni Brain and Shelley Batts' Retrospectacle, makes its debut today.
Not Exactly Rocket Science is also up and running here on ScienceBlogs.com.
If you haven't had a chance to take a look at the relatively new blog Translating Autism, you should definitely check it out too.
Finally, don't miss this week's edition of Encephalon, capably hosted by the fantastic blog Mind Hacks.
dmunger | February 29, 2008[I've been sick the past couple days, so I'm not going to be able to post a new Casual Friday today. But here's an old one that many of our readers probably haven't seen.]
Last week's Casual Friday survey asked readers to describe how they expect other drivers to behave when merging onto the freeway. Now that the survey has been completed, I can let you in on a bit more of the observations that motivated the survey. I live in North Carolina, and I like to visit the big cities on the East coast, especially Washington and New York. This means I've done a lot of driving through Virginia, and I…
dmunger | February 26, 2008It's hard to resist flirting with babies. Even if a baby has been screaming her head off for hours on end in the seat behind you on a transatlantic flight, if she giggles and smiles when you're deplaning, you'll probably smile back. What is it about babies that makes our hearts melt almost instantaneously when we see them? Is it their cuteness, their happiness, or just their babyness?
A team led by Morten Kringelbach showed photos of babies and adults to twelve volunteers while their brains were being scanned with a MEG (magnetoencephalography) scanner. The key to the study was the control of…
dmunger | February 25, 2008When adults are asked if they remember pictures of faces, they're more accurate when the faces are the same race as they are. It makes some sense -- people are likely to spend more time with and have more same-race friends, so they may become better attuned to the differences in individuals in their own racial group. This finding can be especially important in eyewitness testimony: If a crime victim identifies his assailant as someone of a different race, then the research suggests that this identification is more likely to be problematic than an identification of a same-race suspect.
But…
dmunger | February 22, 2008Last week we asked readers how they used their calendars: we were curious if the way people used their calendars said anything about how busy their lives were. We found out an awful lot about how readers use calendars, but we also found that there may not be much of a pattern to how calendars are used.
First, the basics: what type of calendars do CogDaily readers use?
It was a little surprising for me to see that over a third of our tech-savvy readers still rely on printed calendars -- 208 out of 612 respondents. Even if readers said they used one or the other type of calendar, we allowed…
dmunger | February 20, 2008One of the most common "icebreaker" conversation topics is music preferences. We ask friends what they're listening to on their iPods, bloggers post playlists on their sidebars, and one of the most popular websites on the planet (MySpace) is built around sharing music. The assumption is that musical preferences can tell us something beyond what someone likes to listen to -- we believe we can judge a person's personality, fashion preferences, and more based just on the style of music they prefer.
For me, it's difficult not to form a mental picture of a person when I hear what music they listen…
dmunger | February 19, 2008Take a look at this amazing illusion created by Arthur Shapiro (you'll need the latest version of Flash Player to see it):
You're looking at two donut-shaped figures whose "holes" are gradually changing color from black to white and back again. It appears that the holes are changing in an opposite pattern -- when one is light, the other is dark, and so on. But if you click to remove the surrounding donuts, you'll see that the two holes are actually changing together.
If you're still not convinced, get a friend to help. One of you looks at the light donut and the other looks at the dark donut…
dmunger | February 18, 2008The Encephalon blog carnival is up and running at SharpBrains after a short hiatus. Check it out for the latest great posts in psychology and neuroscience.
dmunger | February 15, 2008Just a few months ago, I finally convinced Greta to convert her old paper appointment calendar to an electronic version. Now instead of writing her appointments down in a little book, she enters it in her computer or her PDA. It's now possible for me to see her schedule on my computer, and vice versa.
But even though we're both computerized, we use our calendars differently. I need an alarm to remind me of any event, but Greta simply checks her calendar every day to remind herself of her plans for the day. This leads to endless possibilities for confusion. She might enter an item on the…
dmunger | February 14, 2008I don't need words to think about the shape of a car, or how to throw a football, or the taste of a chocolate chip cookie. In fact, things like that are probably easier to think about without using language. That's why the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- that language is necessary for conscious thought -- doesn't hold up. But even if language isn't required for some domains, it's still possible that it is required for certain types of mental processes. It may even be required for some thoughts that aren't obviously related to language.
Some research suggests that understanding…
dmunger | February 13, 2008Which of these two pictures is more memorable?
The shot on the left is interesting primarily because Nora's in it -- if it was just a picture of a muddy trail, it wouldn't be notable at all to most people. The shot on the right is a dramatic mountain scene that you might remember even though (or perhaps because) there's not a human in sight.
But a seasoned hiker might be more interested in the photo of the muddy trail, which gives more information about the difficulty of the hike than a panoramic shot. Just as expert chess players are good at remembering the position of chess pieces on the…
dmunger | February 12, 2008Cognitive Daily readers know that we generally shy away from political issues on our blog. The goal of this blog is to show readers what science is all about, through the example of the fantastic research being done cognitive psychology.
But when James Watson made his most recent comments about race and intelligence, we took notice. James Watson, renowned for his role in discovering the structure of DNA, is also the adviser to the Seed Media Group Board of Directors. The Seed Media Group owns ScienceBlogs.com, which hosts Cognitive Daily.
That's why were troubled last fall, when Watson was…
dmunger | February 11, 2008Take a look at this short video clip (QuickTime required). It's called an RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation), meaning that it's a quick sequence of still images. In this case, it's a random sequence of letters. Your job is to look for a number among the letters. At some point during the clip, you should also see a dot flash in one corner of the video. You also need to take note of the corner in which the dot appears. A rectangle will flash shortly before the dot, possibly giving a clue to where the dot will appear:
It's actually not a very difficult task (especially when I tell you that…
dmunger | February 8, 2008Last week's Casual Fridays study elicited quite a few confused reactions. Listeners heard short music clips and then were asked to indicate which color they associated with each piece from a list of 13 colors.
So were we able to come up with consistent results? Yes. For some of the clips, our 377 listeners were more likely to associate particular colors with that clip. Consider this clip:
Here are the survey responses:
Significantly more listeners picked "yellow" than any other color, and half of all listeners picked yellow or pink. Practically no one chose beige, brown, or any dark color…
dmunger | February 7, 2008You're trapped inside a rectangular room with four doors, one in each corner. You try the first door. It's locked. You try the second and the third door -- locked again. Finally the fourth door opens. You make a point of remembering which corner of the room it's in, which turns out to be useful, because before you know it you're trapped in another identical room. Now, how did you remember what door opened last time? You can't rely on your physical orientation because you might be facing a different direction.
Suppose one wall in both the rooms was a different color from the rest. Then it…
dmunger | February 5, 2008A particular source of dread for politicians is how to respond to negative campaigning or other information impugning their character. By responding, they might only bring attention to an issue that voters hadn't even recognized: "Contrary to my opponent's claims, I have stopped beating my wife, and I haven't consumed more than a fifth of hard liquor in a single sitting."
Worse, many studies have found that even unequivocal denials fail to register in memory. In one study, participants read a report about the possible cause of a fire: a room full of oil paint and pressurized gas cylinders.…
dmunger | February 4, 2008We've heard from a few teachers who use Cognitive Daily in class, and we know several class web sites link to CogDaily. So we were wondering: if you're a teacher, instructor, or professor, how do you use Cognitive Daily in your class? As a suggested supplemental reading? A required assignment?
Or maybe you've consciously chosen not to use CogDaily in class. We'd also appreciate it if you'd let us know why you don't use it. Maybe there's something else we could do to make it more usable for your class. We're open to suggestions.
Even if you feel like you're just repeating someone else's…
dmunger | February 1, 2008A while back we did a little non-scientific study on whether people experience different colors based on their emotions, and indeed found a very small effect.
For this week's study, we thought we'd see if we could extend those results to music. All we're asking you to do is listen to eight short audio clips, then say what color you associate the clips with.
Click here to participate
As usual, the study is short, with just 8 questions. The 8 clips range from 10 seconds to 70 seconds long. Most are shorter than one minute, so the whole thing should take less than 10 minutes to complete. You…
dmunger | January 31, 2008When we watch a movie, we're usually not conscious of the cuts made by the editor. The camera angle may change dozens of times during a scene, and we follow along as if the flashing from one viewpoint to another wasn't at all unusual. You might think this is just because we've been accustomed to watching TV and movies, but researchers have found that even people who've never seen a motion picture have no difficulty following along with the cuts and different camera angles in a video.
But little research has actually been done on the impact of changing camera angles in a movie on our…
dmunger | January 30, 2008Today is my birthday, so instead of offering a post for you, I thought I'd ask for a small gift. I'd like to revamp my personal web browsing system so that it's more efficient. I already keep up with psychology blogs via RSS, but I'd like to start browsing other things -- news, entertainment, and so on -- the same way.
So here's what I want for my birthday: I'd like you to suggest what should go in my RSS reader.
I'd like my whole list to be browsable in 30 minutes or so, so I need a *limited* list of suggestions for good RSS feeds to subscribe to. The whole list should have perhaps 100-200…