dmunger | November 7, 2007Update: Thanks to everyone who voted. The contest is over; it has been declared a tie. That's a little odd because at last count, Bad Astronomy was ahead. But it's likely there were trickerations on both sides. Oh well.
Thousands of Google Reader users subscribe to Cognitive Daily's feed via the Google Science bundle. This means you've chosen to seek out the best science content on the internet. Most Google Reader users never click through to this site to read our posts -- and that's fine with us. You're busy people.
However, I would like to ask you do one thing for us in the name of…
dmunger | November 7, 2007Children follow a consistent pattern when they acquire language. Instead of learning the most common words first, they start by learning a disproportionate number of nouns. In the youngest talkers nouns form up to 60 percent of their vocabulary, compared to just 40 percent of the vocabulary of a typical 2 and a half year-old (who now knows over 600 words).
This pattern applies in many different languages, even Mandarin and Korean, where verbs appear in more prominent positions in sentences. The phenomenon is so universal that it has led some theorists to speculate that acquisition of non-noun…
dmunger | November 6, 2007Well, we didn't quite reach our goal of raising $6,000 for Donors Choose. However, we were able to raise over $2,000 for students in underfunded schools. Greta and I matched ten percent of the donations, contributing $203 in addition to the funds you donated.
Five of the projects we chose are now fully funded: Roller Coaster Physics, Leaping Into Math and Science, What do you see?--A Spatial Visualization Study, Where Did the Playground Go?, Psych for Seniors Part I, and Math Manipulatives To Teach Students Concepts With. There are still a couple projects that are partially funded -- and just…
dmunger | November 5, 2007Imagine that, over the course of a conversation with a friend from work, she makes the following two statements:
It's possible that my brother will be coming into town tomorrow
It's possible that our boss knows about the affair you had with the intern
(You might also have to imagine a more adventurous romantic life for yourself). Which of these two statements do you think your friend believes is most likely to be true? Let's make this a poll:
If I did a good job setting up this scenario, I should be able to predict the results of the poll. I'll get to my prediction in a minute.
First, let'…
dmunger | November 2, 2007I'll fess up: I leave coffee grounds on the kitchen counter when I make coffee. It bugs Greta, but it doesn't bother me. Meanwhile, it bothers me when Greta leaves her shoes next to the stools in the kitchen, and it drives both of us crazy when the kids pile their backpacks at the bottom of the stairs -- then immediately head up to their rooms without their stuff.
This week's study is about household messes. Is it just the messes that other people make that bother us? Or are we sometimes annoyed by our own messes? Maybe the messes we dislike the most are the ones we think someone else should…
dmunger | November 1, 2007This article was originally posted on May 10, 2006
Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings…
dmunger | November 1, 2007Tomorrow's Casual Fridays study will be about messes: who makes messes, and who cleans them up. In order to do this right I'm going to need a little help from you.
What I need to know are the typical sorts of messes people (including you) create in your home or workplace. Everything from dirty socks on the living room floor, to coffee grounds on the kitchen counter, to muddy footprints in the entry hall. Just help me out by listing some of the messes that particularly bother you in the place you live or work.
dmunger | October 31, 2007Does this ever happen to you? You're preparing green beans to be cooked, putting the stems in the trash and the beans in a bowl. Suddenly you realize you've started putting the stems in the bowl. The dinner guests will be arriving soon, and now you have to search through the beans to pull out the stems, in order to avoid an embarrassing incident later that evening.
Okay, maybe it's just me. But what's the best way to find the stems? Is it faster to pore over the bowl, methodically scanning for each remnant? Or is it better to step back and take a holistic view of the bowl, letting the stems…
dmunger | October 30, 2007Updated 5:35 p.m. EDT on 10/30/07: Psych for Seniors Part I is now fully funded, with over $400 in donations today! Let's get Part II funded!
There are just two days left in our DonorsChoose Challenge to raise money for kids to learn science. Have you been putting off your donation? You still have an opportunity to make a difference.
The Psych for Seniors proposal appears to be the most popular among our readers, and with just another $816, the second part of that proposal will be fully funded. We can help students in school with a 40 percent poverty rate get the textbooks they need to offer…
dmunger | October 29, 2007We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article or press release.
Within a month, these blog posts will also be aggregated at BPR3.org, so everyone can go to one place to locate the most serious, thoughtful analysis and commentary on the web.
If you're a blogger, we encourage you to start using the icons now. If you're a blog reader, look for these icons to find the posts that bloggers have thought…
dmunger | October 26, 2007Here are a few neat optical illusions.
1. Multi-colored X?
(via Grand Illusions)
It appears that the X is two different colors, but it's actually made using just one shade of pink.
(more below)
2. Is this a circle?
(via eluzions)
It is indeed.
3. Some classic illusions embedded in an animated video:
Hope you enjoyed these!
[Mainly this is to distract you from the fact that there is no Casual Friday post today. There was a billing problem with our survey provider. I fully expect Casual Fridays to be back next week]
dmunger | October 25, 2007Take a look at these schematic faces:
Just a few simple changes to the mouth and eyebrows can create faces depicting a wide array of emotions. Face 1, for example, is clearly quite happy, and face 12 is sad. Face 7 is obviously angry. But what about face 4? Embarrassed? Happy but sleepy?
Perhaps your own emotion at the time you look at the faces might affect your understanding of the emotions the faces convey, especially when the emotional state depicted is unclear. Perhaps people suffering from clinical depression are stuck in a sort of infinite feedback loop: every face they see seems…
dmunger | October 25, 2007
ScienceBloggers Walk Down Memory Lane
This is the geek equivalent of "when I was your age I used to walk to six miles school barefoot -- in the snow -- uphill both ways!"
Daylight Savings Time worse than previously thought
I don't know about that. I've always thought it was pretty bad...
Brain regions responsible for optimism located
I'm certain this will lead to cures for world hunger and global warming. Or so my rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala tell me.
Should the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Cancel Their San Diego Meeting?
Can't wait 'til Casual Friday? A fellow…
dmunger | October 24, 2007The way subliminal advertising is portrayed in movies and hyped in some media outlets, briefly and imperceptibly flashing a brand name during a TV show can turn people into mindless cyborgs who can't resist the urge to shop at a particular store or drink a certain brand of beer. Overhyped as these claims may be, there is a grain of truth in them -- as a recent post in Neuromarketing points out, subliminal images really can affect our preferences:
In Your Money and Your Brain, Philip Zweig describes a study conducted by psychologist Robert Zajonc almost forty years ago. Zajonc exposed a two…
dmunger | October 23, 2007
When Jim was about 13 months old, I happened to be enrolled in a graduate level developmental psychology class. Our big term paper assignment involved observing two children at different developmental stages. I decided it would be cool to do a "longitudinal study" of Jim's language development over the course of the semester -- my "two children" would be one person -- Jimmy (as we called him then), at the beginning and end of the semester. The period from 13 to 16 months old is often a very important period in language development, when many babies begin to understand not only words but also…
dmunger | October 22, 2007
Encephalon 34 is ready to go at Distributed Neuron
N Skills Every Scientist Should Have
Help Chad come up with a list of the most important skills for scientists
Some tips for putting together a Behavioral Science grant proposal
The relationship between money and happiness
Key conclusions: Money doesn't make you happy, but happy people end up making more money
If you don't like laughing, don't watch this video
A brilliantly executed brain-themed spoof of educational programming. "Learn" how to conduct your own neuroscience experiments!
dmunger | October 22, 2007As promised, Greta and I have given our first matching gift to the Donors Choose challenge. We donated $103 as our 10 percent match for the $1,039 that had already been donated. We decided to donate to the two most popular proposals: Psych for Seniors and Calculate the Joy of Helping At Risk Students Part 1.
Now for the bad news: Our challenge has collected just $1,142 of our $6,000 goal. Based on our readership statistics, that makes CogDaily readers the least generous of all the ScienceBlogs participating in the challenge. We're the second most popular blog in the challenge, but we're in…
dmunger | October 19, 2007With hundreds of seemingly worthy charities out there, how do we decide which ones to donate to? Even if we eliminate charities that aren't effective, there are still too many choices, and too little money, to donate to all of them. In the Donors Choose campaign, bloggers are going to impressive lengths to coax their readers into giving. But do incentives such as this really work?
We asked our readers, and 261 of them responded. That's the lowest response rate we've had this year, suggesting that many readers aren't much interested in charity, even when motivated by a cute photo of a child.…
dmunger | October 19, 2007Here's an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds. It starts by discussing the surprising accuracy of Wikipedia.
The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations). Instead, it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought…
dmunger | October 18, 2007
60 percent of Neuroscience conference authors only present one paper in five years
Book Review - On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society
Is it possible that most soldiers only rarely use their weapons, even in pitched battle?
Why There Aren't Right-Handed Apes, Or: Handedness and The Evolution of Language
Why are bluetooth headsets so lame?
Is it possible that a *more* conspicuous headset will make you look like less of a dork?
Women in Math, Science, and Engineering, and Playing Video Games
Chris offers the full analysis of a the article we…