dmunger | January 29, 2008Two facts are true about young children: they sleep a lot more than adults, and they learn language at an astonishing rate. How can they learn so much when they're sleeping so much of the time? Perhaps sleep itself enhances learning. In fact, a number of studies suggest that naps actually enhance learning in adults. What about kids?
A team led by Rebecca Gómez developed a clever test to see if 15-month-olds learn language faster when they've had a nap. At 15 months, most infants understand a lot of language, but don't produce much. But of course, each baby learns at a slightly different rate…
dmunger | January 29, 2008Yesterday's post offered a simple poll question:
# How Many People Will Select The Same Option As You?
0%
1-25%
26-50%
51-75%
76-99%
100%
I didn't think this poll would attract as much interest as it did because in one sense I was just copying a poll from Slashdot. I guess people liked the fact that I offered one twist: I attempted to shape the results by suggesting that the "obvious" answer of 1-25% wouldn't work. If everyone was choosing their responses randomly, we might expect about 16 percent of respondents to choose this option, and therefore it would be the "correct" response.…
dmunger | January 28, 2008Slashdot's poll of the moment is just fantastic, combining psychology and reasoning in a very cool way. Here's the question:
# How Many People Will Select The Same Option As You?
0%
1-25%
26-50%
51-75%
76-99%
100%
Just CowboyNeal [this is the traditional joke Slashdot poll answer]
At first pass, you might figure that there are 6 possible responses, so if people respond randomly then about 16 percent will choose each answer, so the correct response would be 1-25 percent.
But of course, if everyone used that same logic, then many more than 25 percent of respondents would choose that…
dmunger | January 28, 2008The number of psychology / neuroscience blogs on scienceblogs.com will soon decrease by one. However, the number of bloggers will stay the same. How is that possible?
The hilarious Omni Brain and thought-provoking Restrospectacle are each closing down shop. But they're re-emerging as a new blog that combines the efforts of Steve and Shelley. They haven't yet come up with a name for their project, so head on over to their blogs and offer suggestions. If they choose a name picked by a commenter, they're offering a generous prize. I'm closing comments here so all their suggestions are in the…
dmunger | January 25, 2008Last week we asked readers how often they eat at buffet-style restaurants, where diners serve themselves unlimited portions of food from heated serving tables. The question was inspired by a post by ScienceBlogs editor Virginia Hughes, which was inspired by an innocuous comment I made as we were heading to our hotel restaurant table: "People in North Carolina are really into buffets." So, is North Carolina the champion state for buffets?
Nope.
In fact, North Carolina ranked 20th on our list. The number one state for buffets was Kansas, averaging 6 visits per month. Second on the list was New…
dmunger | January 25, 2008Three great new bloggers have joined the ScienceBlogs team:
Kate Seip has joined Jake at Pure Pedantry. You may remember her excellent blog Anterior Commissure.
Sometime CogDaily commenter DrugMonkey is also now in the house, with coblogger PhysioProf.
Let's welcome these fabulous new additions to ScienceBlogs! I also met up with one more great blogger who'll soon be joining ScienceBlogs at the Science Blogging Conference last weekend, but that news will have to wait for the official announcement.
dmunger | January 24, 2008When you know something, is that different from remembering? Both types of thoughts are clearly part of the memory system, but is there really any difference between the two concepts? We often use the two terms nearly interchangeably: I might say "I remember Suzanne had her purse when we left the restaurant because I saw her pull out her phone at the bus stop," but I might equally say "I know Suzanne had her purse on the bus because she was gabbing on the phone the whole ride home."
But the subtle linguistic difference between the two terms isn't meaningless. We might know George W. Bush is…
dmunger | January 23, 2008Less than a week after its official launch, ResearchBlogging.org now has 78 active, registered users. We're already bigger than ScienceBlogs.com! Of course, many of our users are ScienceBloggers -- these projects can definitely work together. We can also get much bigger. Over 200 bloggers have used our icon, and we need to get them signed up for the new aggregation site. There's the potential to enroll literally hundreds more bloggers from all parts of the research community -- not just scientists.
All in all the launch has gone amazingly smoothly. As far as I know, the site never went down,…
dmunger | January 22, 2008When we first moved to the small suburban town we still live in, we quickly realized we needed to buy a second car. Nora and Jim were just one and two and a half years old, only barely beginning to understand language. After we made our purchase, sometimes we drove in the old car (a Subaru station wagon), and sometimes in the new car (a Plymouth minivan). Since neither child could pronounce words as complicated as "minivan," they had to come up with their own way to refer to the vehicles. They called the Subaru the "red car" and the van the "blue car."
But there were many other ways they…
dmunger | January 21, 2008I'm pleased to announce a new site that allows bloggers to not only show when they're blogging about peer-reviewed research, but also to share that work with readers and bloggers around the world.
ResearchBlogging.org doesn't just enable you to mark posts with our icon, it also collects those posts in one central location. Readers can then visit just one site to find all the posts on a topic, or browse through all of the blogosphere's most thoughtful posts on peer-reviewed research.
Here's how it works:
Bloggers -- often experts in their field -- find exciting new peer-reviewed research they…
dmunger | January 19, 2008I'm posting this live from my presentation at the Science Blogging conference. My session is entitled "How to build interactivity into your blog," and this post offers some links that I discuss in the presentation.
Polling services
Blog Flux polls
Quimble
Survey web sites
Question Pro
Survey Monkey
Survey Gizmo
Reviews of polling and survey services
How to report scientific research to a general audience
dmunger | January 18, 2008I'm at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference this weekend, and I wasn't planning on doing a Casual Friday this week. But Virginia Hughes gave me an idea for a really quick one. What state boasts the most-frequent buffet-style restaurant diners?
Click here to respond
This survey has a mere two questions, and you have until Thursday, January 24, to respond.
dmunger | January 17, 2008Take a look at this slideshow (QuickTime required). You'll first see a photo in perfect focus. Then 12 more pictures will flash by, each of them blurred using Photoshop. Finally, the original photo will appear again. Is it the same as before, or slightly blurrier or sharper?
I'll give the answer after a few readers have had a chance to make a guess in the comments. Most people with normal vision will gradually adapt to blurry photos (though it might take a little longer than I've allowed in this movie). Then when they see a photo that's in focus, it seems too sharp -- as if it's been…
dmunger | January 15, 2008At least once or twice a week at dinnertime, our family has what we call a "harmony meal." Jim and Nora are good eaters with broad tastes, but they both (along with me and Greta) also have some foods they don't like. A harmony meal is a meal where everyone in the family likes every dish we serve. These aren't necessarily the healthiest meals (spaghetti with meat sauce and garlic bread is a favorite), but it's nice to have a meal where everyone's happy about what's being served.
When we're not having a harmony meal, we all still manage to find something we'll eat -- and our kids understand…
dmunger | January 14, 2008I was a little surprised by an offhand observation Thomas Schubert made in a recent research report. He claimed that while men will commonly make a fist to celebrate a goal in a soccer match or a home run in baseball, it's unusual for women to do so.
I'm sure I've seen both female athletes and fans celebrating with fist pumps. But maybe I only noticed these cases because they were exceptions. Let's see if we can verify Schubert's observation with a little poll.
Take the pollFree Poll by Blog Flux
But there are additional gender dynamics to making fists besides who celebrates that way at a…
dmunger | January 11, 2008Last week we asked our readers about New Years' resolutions. We said we wanted to know whether resolutions made on New Years' Day were any more effective than commitments made at other times of the year. We are interested in that question, but we didn't tell you about the question that interested us the most: How many different resolutions should you make?
Our son Jim made so many resolutions this year that he actually organized them into subcategories. This struck us as not a very good idea -- if you make lots and lots of resolutions, then you may not be as committed to each one. At the time…
dmunger | January 10, 2008There was a lot of buzz online a couple months back when an article entitled "Moniker Maladies" made what seemed to many to be a startling claim: Baseball players strike out more often when their names start with "K"; Students with the initials "C" and "D" get worse grades than others.
Actually, this effect, known as the "name-letter effect," has been known for several years. If your name -- even your last name -- starts with T, you're more likely to live in Tacoma or Tulsa than San Francisco or Springfield. Chris at Mixing Memory wrote an excellent summary of the research, so I won't repeat…
dmunger | January 10, 2008A reader pointed out to me that Schultze's 1978 study did not find a bias to hear a fast tempo as speeding up and slow tempo as slowing down. In fact, Schultze found that we were remarkably accurate at detecting tempo changes. So we do replicate Schultze! A misreading on my part of Quinn and Watt led to the confusion.
However, Quinn and Watt do cite a 1997 article which claims to find the bias I describe in the post from yesterday and the day before.
I haven't been able to get my hands on the article, but here's the reference:
Vos, P. G., van Assen, M., & Fraiiek, M. (1997) Perceived…
dmunger | January 9, 2008Yesterday's demonstration about perception of tempo simply didn't work. If we had successfully replicated Schultze's Vos et al.'s study, we would have seen a systematic bias in the results.
I'd like to give this one more shot (I promise this will be my last attempt!). There are a couple reasons why the original might not have worked. First, people might have been using the visual progress of the audio player to help determine whether the clips were slowing. I've corrected that by narrowing the width of the player so you can't see the progress of the clip as it plays. Second, because the notes…
dmunger | January 8, 2008Listen to the following three short audio samples. Your job is to say whether the tempo (the rate at which the notes are played) is speeding up or slowing down. Even if it sounds like it's maintaining the same tempo, make your best guess as to whether it's speeding up or slowing down.
[Update: There's a new demo here. And see this correction]
Clip 1:
Take the pollFree Poll by Blog Flux
Clip 2:
Take the pollFree Poll by Blog Flux
Clip 3:
Take the pollFree Poll by Blog Flux
If the results here follow the pattern found in a number of studies, there should be a bias in the responses (and yes,…