dmunger | January 7, 2008The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- stated in its strongest form -- claims that language determines thoughts: if a language doesn't have a means of expressing a particular idea, then people speaking that language can't even conceive of that idea. This strong form has long since been rejected: There are plenty of thoughts we can have without having the words to express them.
But there is also little question that the available words do have an important impact on our thoughts. If a language doesn't have a way to express numbers above 10, for example, then that would probably result in a somewhat…
dmunger | January 4, 2008This year Greta and I rang in the new year with a couple of good friends, some good wine, and not a lot of fuss or formality. We quietly noted when the clock struck midnight and went on with whatever we were talking about at the time.
Our son Jim marked the occasion much more seriously, with several resolutions directed at improving his fitness, eating habits, and school work.
It got us to wondering: what kind of people are most likely to make New Years' resolutions? Are New Years' resolutions any more successful than pledges for personal improvement made at other times of the year? And what…
dmunger | January 3, 2008During my brief tenure as a high school teacher, one common suggestion I got from supportive colleagues was to "make your tests teaching tools." "That's often the only time you've really got your students' attention," they suggested, "so don't neglect the opportunity to teach them something."
What they meant is that you shouldn't use misleading or false information in tests as a "trick" to make sure they grasp the material: your test might be the only thing students remember from a unit.
But there's another reason testing is important for learning. For decades researchers have known that more…
dmunger | January 2, 2008You might think humans are equally good at estimating distances no matter which direction they're looking. After all, we use the same visual tools to make those estimates -- binocular disparity (the different views we see from each eye), occlusion (whether one object is in front of or behind another), and so on. But consider the situation depicted to the right. Nora is inching her way down a steep rock column, with near-vertical drops on either side of her. If she underestimates the distance to flat ground below, she might decide she doesn't need to worry about falling. Overestimating the…
dmunger | December 31, 2007[Originally posted on November 7, 2005]
What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her on television. Could she be the manager of your local bank? Perhaps you don't know her at all ... but you've still got a feeling you do. What's that all about?
One theory of memory proposes that what we remember depends on our expectations. We're less likely to remember our old classmate at the coffee shop than at the high school reunion. At the bank, we might greet the manager by…
dmunger | December 28, 2007Over at BPR3, a reader brought up an interesting question about the nature of peer-reviewed research, which I thought was relevant to our readers here as well. I'm reposting my entire response below.
The system of peer review, the bulwark of academic publishing, has served scholars for centuries. The principle behind the system is simple: If experts in a field find a research report noteworthy, then that report deserves to be published.
But who is an "expert"? And who decides who the experts are? Couldn't a group of individuals committed to promoting their own research -- which may or may not…
dmunger | December 27, 2007Earlier this week we discussed the relationship between life satisfaction and other measures of well-being, finding that for measures such as relative income, the happiest people weren't always the best-off. For relationships, however, the happiest individuals also seem to do better.
But these measures were only taken at an instant in time. What about over longer periods? The College and Beyond study questioned incoming college freshmen in 1976, and included a self-rating of "cheerfulness," among many other measures. Then those same individuals were surveyed in 1995. How did cheerfulness…
dmunger | December 26, 2007[Originally posted on February 20, 2006]
Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now, at age 12). However, as our knowledge of how infants begin to perceive the world around them has increased, we've learned that the world of a three-month-old literally looks different to them than the world we perceive as adults. That's because vision, which seems so obvious and instinctive, is actually an active process. When we perceive the world visually, we're not…
dmunger | December 24, 2007Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who are less happy, even years after the original happiness assessment.
People around the world rate happiness as more important than intelligence, success, and material wealth. But is it possible to be too happy? An extremely happy person might be less motivated to seek a better job, more education, or better health care. Short-term happiness could conceivably be a route to a…
gmunger | December 21, 2007I just finished reading Jonah Lehrer's book Proust was a Neuroscientist.
Quick review: good book, very fun read, and I'm happy to recommend it to almost everyone. I just have one small quibble.
For the quibble to make any sense, you need to know something about my teaching. Students in all my psychology classes have to write a few paragraphs to earn "culture points." They must consider how psychology connects to art, though the social context surrounding the event is also fair game for analysis. So my students attend a concert, visit a museum, or go to a play or dance performance and then…
dmunger | December 20, 2007Last year, a friend of Greta's died tragically young. He was a pillar of the community, and Greta was honored to learn that he wanted her to play the oboe at his memorial service, which would be attended by hundreds of people. Greta has performed in countless concerts, with audiences just as large, but the thought of flubbing up at a ceremony honoring the life of a great man was absolutely nerve-wracking. The problem was compounded by the fact that Greta herself was in mourning for her friend.
In the end, she was able to summon up the courage to play beautifully, and received dozens of…
dmunger | December 19, 2007Do smells have an impact on how we judge people? Certainly if someone smells bad, we may have a negative impression of the person. But what if the smell is so subtle we don't consciously notice it? Research results have been mixed, with some studies actually reporting that we like people more when in the presence of undetectable amounts of bad-smelling stuff. How could that be?
A team led by Wen Li believes that the judges might have actually been able to detect the odor, and then accounted for it in their response -- giving a face the benefit of the doubt when there's a hint of bad odor.
But…
dmunger | December 17, 2007This past weekend, I went to two different holiday parties. While many of the people at the parties were friends, I was also introduced to a couple dozen new people -- out of town guests of the hosts, friends of friends, or people from our small town that I somehow had never met. If I run into one of these people at the coffee shop tomorrow, how likely will I be to remember that I've met them before? One possibly relevant factor is that I was a designated driver at just one of the two parties.
There's another factor that has been demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether a face is…
dmunger | December 14, 2007A few weeks ago, I was excited to learn that a project I'm working on got written up on NPR's News Blog. However, I was less excited when I saw the way my own status was described:
Dave Munger, a science blogger and stay-at-home dad in Davidson, N.C., wanted to find a way to show people that some blog posts are meant to carry more weight than a rant or an off-hand comment.
Would people consider my project to be less noteworthy if they thought of me as a "stay-at-home dad"? Technically, I guess I am a stay-at-home parent because my office is in my house, but since my primary occupation has…
dmunger | December 13, 2007The human perceptual system is able to enforce a large array of illusions on our conscious experience. Most importantly, we hold the illusion of a complete and vivid picture of our surroundings, while in fact we selectively ignore nearly everything we see.
There's a good reason for this, of course: focusing on the task at hand generally consumes nearly all of the processing power our brains have to offer. If we need to shift our focus to another aspect of our surroundings, we can do it nearly instantaneously. But how do we decide which items to pay attention to? There are a couple…
dmunger | December 11, 2007Listen to this short recording:
It's a sequence that repeats every sixth beat. But when we're listening to music, we usually prefer to divide rhythm into two- or three-beat patterns (duple or triple rhythm). In this case, the sequence doesn't make it obvious which pattern is correct. A traditional duple rhythm, like a march, would accent every other beat -- the musicians play every other note a little louder. Similarly, a traditional triple rhythm, like a waltz, accents every third beat.
When we're dancing (or marching), we move in time to these accented beats. Indeed, it's often difficult…
dmunger | December 11, 2007Scienceblogs has launched the beta version of its German-language site. You can check it out at Scienceblogs.de.
The site looks great -- I've never regretted not learning German more! It also offers a feature I'd like to see here on the English version: A thumbnail view of the ScienceBlogs Select feed (in English).
The logical next question: What language should ScienceBlogs tackle next? You can share your preference with the ScienceBlogs overlords here.
dmunger | December 10, 2007There's been a lot of discussion online lately about the relative importance of the position of an author name. Is it more impressive to be a first author on a report? If so, how much? John Lynch made a graph of Guillermo Gonzalez's publication record as a way of illustrating his argument that Gonzalez didn't deserve tenure. But there's a twist to the graph: it not only indicates articles on which Gonzales was an author, but also articles on which he was first author.
As the average number of authors in journal articles increases, does that mean that the contribution of individual authors is…
dmunger | December 7, 2007This week's Casual Fridays study is just a quick reading comprehension test. Is that all it is? I can't tell you. Why not just try it and find out for yourself?
Click here to participate
As usual, the survey is quite short, with just 8 questions. It should take only a minute or two to complete. You have until the morning of Thursday, December 13, to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents.
Don't forget to come back next Friday to see the results!
[Since there are a few "secret" details to this study, I'm going to close the comments for now.]
dmunger | December 6, 2007When we are trying to understand what someone is saying, we rely a lot on the movement of their face. We pay attention to how their faces move, and that informs our understanding of what is said. The classic example of this is the McGurk effect, where the same sound accompanied by different facial movements gets interpreted differently.
Take a look at this short video clip (QuickTime required) of me talking, with my voice muffled by what sounds like cocktail party conversation:
Can you understand what I'm saying? What about after I stop moving? Can you understand me in the second part of…