dmunger | September 7, 2007Some people suck down diet soft drinks, eat diet potato chips, even put diet creamer in their coffee. Others say part of the enjoyment of these things is knowing they're not "good for you."
When it comes to eating dessert, that dividing line can seem even stronger. Some people say that if you want to watch your weight, you shouldn't be eating dessert in the first place, while others argue that dessert's an important part of every meal, so it's a good idea to come up with low-fat, low-calorie desserts that still taste good.
So how prevalent is each of these schools of thought? What type of…
dmunger | September 7, 2007How would you like to win a subscription to Seed, the journal Nature, and a boatload of other prizes? If you've got Photoshop and a good idea, you could earn those prizes, plus the admiration of the academic blogosphere, with just a few minutes of effort.
As you may know, BPR3 is trying to create a universal icon that everyone can use on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. We'd like the icon to be something special and memorable, which is why we're opening up…
dmunger | September 6, 2007
What is "significant" research? In most psychology journals, "significant" results are those measuring up to a difficult-to-understand statistical standard called a null-hypothesis significance test. This test, which seems embedded and timeless, actually has its origins in theoretical arguments less than a century old.
Today's gold standard of statistical significance is the p value, described by Ronald Fisher less than 50 years ago. Many people, even many active researchers, don't understand much about the p value other than when it's less than .05, the research is usually considered…
dmunger | September 6, 2007A month ago, Eric Schwitzgebel wrote a post critical of meta-analysis, suggesting that studies finding null results don't tend to get published, thus skewing meta-analysis results. I objected to some of his reasoning, my most important point being that the largest studies are going to get published, so most of the data collected actually does appear in the literature.
Now Schwitzgebel's got a new post about meta-analysis, again taking a critical stance. First, he discusses experimenter bias:
An experimenter who expects an effect of a certain sort is more likely to find such an effect than…
dmunger | September 5, 2007Speed dating is one of the hottest trends in the match-up business: You go to a non-threatening restaurant or bar, then spend five minutes or so face-to-face with each of up to 30 members of your preferred gender. Everyone has a card or some other method by which they indicate whether they'd like to meet again; only when both people in a pair express interest are they given contact information. The trend is so prevalent that I've seen at least two movies recently featuring speed dating ("Hitch" was one of them; I can't remember the other one).
But do you actually learn enough about the person…
dmunger | September 4, 2007
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Countless change blindness studies have showed that we're extremely bad at noticing when a scene has changed. We fail to notice objects moving, disappearing, or changing color, seemingly right before our eyes. But sometimes we do notice the change. What sorts of changes are we more likely to notice? I've created a simple demo that may (or may not) help answer that question.
Take a look at this movie (QuickTime required). It will show a scene for six seconds. Then it will briefly flash white, and the same scene will be shown for another six seconds. Can you spot…
dmunger | September 4, 2007A report on ABC news suggests that using fMRI brain imaging to detect lies is as simple as comparing two "pictures" of brain activity:
How do you tell which is the truthteller? It's easy, the article claims:
Who needs Pinocchio's nose to find a lie? The FMRI scan on the right detects a brain processing a false statement; the less colorful brain on the left corresponds to someone in the middle of a truthful statement.
According to the article,
When someone lies, the brain first stops itself from telling the truth, then generates the deception. When the brain is working hard at lying, more…
dmunger | September 3, 2007Note: This article was originally posted on November 14, 2006
If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a…
dmunger | August 31, 2007Last week we asked our readers about where they got their news. I haven't watched local news for years, and I was wondering if anyone else in the blogosphere did. As several respondents pointed out, our results aren't going to be exactly a cross-section of society at large, but it may be useful to see the relative importance of different news sources among our readers. Here's a snapshot of the results:
As you can see, only two sources of local news were less important to our readers than television, and only one of those ("other print source") was significantly less important. The only…
dmunger | August 31, 2007Today is Blog Day, which means we're supposed to suggest five new blogs so our readers can expand their horizons. I think I'm going to end up linking to more than five blogs. Here goes:
The Anterior Commisure discusses the science surrounding sex and mating, in both humans and other organisms. Really fascinating stuff. I just discovered this blog a couple weeks ago, and I'm loving it.
Issues in the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science has a very descriptive title. It offers in-depth philosophical musings informed by science.
Music Matters is an excellent blog about music and cognition…
dmunger | August 30, 2007When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions:
Pastor: Who's more intelligent?
Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good]
Pastor: Who's more emotional?
Dave: She is. [Oops!]
The pastor and I chuckled, but Greta gave me a rather icy stare. Was I just confirming the "women are more emotional" stereotype, or was I making a real observation about her behavior? Perhaps more importantly, was I dooming our relationship to failure,…
dmunger | August 29, 2007Apropos of the Chess/AI discussion that's going on on the front page of ScienceBlogs today (and here at CogDaily), I noticed this little gem in a book I'm currently reading for a review (Sandra and Michael Blakeslee's The Body Has a Mind of Its Own):
Meaning is rooted in agency (the ability to act and choose), and agency depends on embodiment. In fact, this is a hard-won lesson that the artificial intelligence community has finally begun to grasp after decades of frustration: Nothing truly intelligent is going to develop in a bodiless mainframe. In real life there is no such thing as…
dmunger | August 28, 2007
We can recognize the faces of our friends very quickly from just a snapshot. Within 150 milliseconds of being flashed a photo, brain signals respond differently to photos containing animals than photos with no animals. We can categorize scenes as "beach," "forest," or "city" when they are flashed for even shorter periods.
But we also get a great deal of information from the motion of people and animals. We can identify our friends and family members just from a point-light display of them walking. We can also detect the emotions of point-light faces, and even the species of point-light…
dmunger | August 28, 2007When I was in school, teachers often implored us to not put off studying to the last minute. Sometimes they even suggested that we spread out our studying over a period of weeks. But who has time for that? Most of us just studied the night before the test -- with varying results, of course.
But surely research has been done on the ideal way to study. Is it possible to over-study? How much studying is enough? Wray Herbert has uncovered some real data on the problem, from a study by Doug Rohrer and Harold Paschler:
They had two groups of students study new vocabulary in different ways. One…
dmunger | August 27, 2007The blogosphere is abuzz with reports about a new initiative by commercial scholarly publishers to discredit the open access movement.
Prism describes itself as an organization to "protect the quality of scientific research", which it hopes to do by opposing policies "that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing." What policies are they opposed to? Why, this one, which recommends that NIH-funded research results be freely available to the public when they are published.
In short, they want to protect science by locking it up under copyright.…
dmunger | August 27, 2007It's been a decade since world chess champion Garry Kasparov was first defeated by a computer. Since then, even after humans retooled their games to match computers, computers have managed draws against the world's greatest players. It seems only a matter of time before computers will win every time -- if humans are willing to play them, that is.
But each time computers have shown their remarkable abilities, detractors have claimed that the computers are really inferior because they apply brute-force tactics: methodically tracing every possible move instead of creatively reasoning toward a…
dmunger | August 24, 2007The other day I got a phone call from a marketing research firm. I'm a sucker for these things, so I agreed to answer the questions, even though the caller said it might take up to 20 minutes.
CALLER: Can you tell me which local news shows you watch on TV from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. on Monday through Friday?
ME: I don't watch any local news.
CALLER: Okay. Now can you tell me which local news you watch from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Monday through Friday?
ME: Actually, I don't watch any local news on TV, at any time.
CALLER: Oh. I guess this is going to be a short survey.
But the call got me wondering…
dmunger | August 24, 2007Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting has announced a contest to design an icon to identify serious blog posts discussing peer-reviewed research.
Anyone will be able to use the icon on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. Then BPR3.org will track these posts in a centralized listing of the most authoritative writing in the blogosphere.
Although the organization has only existed for 10 days, there's already a great discussion going on there, on…
dmunger | August 23, 2007
Memory is a curious thing, and visual memory is even more curious. In some ways, we don't remember much about the scene that's right in front of us. As countless change blindness studies have shown, we often don't notice even obvious changes taking place in a scene. Other studies have concluded that visual short term memory has a capacity of just three or four objects.
Yet I have vivid visual memories of scenes I have only glimpsed for a few seconds: A deer below the rim of the Grand Canyon; Michael Jordan draining a three-pointer to win the NBA championships; the standing ovation our…
dmunger | August 23, 2007What motivates someone to deny that a disease -- one which kills millions of people -- exists? Why would someone claim that the scientifically-established cause of that disease is actually the product of a vast conspiracy? Why would anyone believe them? This is a question for psychologists, but also for epidemiologists and public health professionals who must deal with the implications of those beliefs.
Tara Smith and Steven Novella have written an excellent, exceptionally readable article in PLOS Medicine which describes the shape and scale of the problem of HIV denial. They point to a…