dmunger | July 30, 2007You might think the best way to make a robot seem more "human" is to reproduce human features as precisely as possible, like in this YouTube video:
But most people are creeped out by robots this "real." We're actually more comfortable interacting with less realistic robots that exhibit some human traits, like this adorable robot named Leo:
So why is this less realistic robot so much more endearing? A fascinating article in this week's New York Times Magazine may offer some answers:
If a robot had features that made it seem, say, 50 percent human, 50 percent machine ... we would be willing…
dmunger | July 27, 2007CBS News has a pretty good video describing the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse in the workplace. Perhaps most shocking is the statistic depicted in this info-graphic:
Our friend Suzanne Greenlee is the benefits director for the food service company Sodhexo USA, and CBS interviewed her for the story. Her company offers free anonymous substance abuse counseling for all its employees, but I suspect that's quite rare in the industry. In a longer version of the interview not available online, Suzanne says that her company believes it saves more money by addressing the problem than the costs…
dmunger | July 27, 2007When I was in college, Ronald Reagan was president, and his wife Nancy Reagan gained a lot of media attention with her project to end drug abuse. Here campaign followed the mantra "just say no," suggesting that kids should be able to resist pressure to use drugs simply by refusing to give in to peer pressure.
Most people my age thought the campaign was ridiculous. On college campuses across the nation there was a "Nancy Reagan Day" where students got together and smoked marijuana in public (no, I didn't participate!).
Psychologists have been exploring the powerful influence of peer pressure…
dmunger | July 26, 2007Fox News has a very detailed review of the so-called $100 laptop, officially called the XO. The technology sounds quite impressive:
Even though bright sunshine is beating down upon the laptop screen, you're having no trouble reading the display.
But the sunlight is OK, since it's powering your system through a small, low-cost solar cell. And the XO doesn't need much power since it runs at a fraction of what laptops that are considered "green" run at.
The review only gets more glowing from there:
I expected to be impressed simply by the economic, low-power capabilities and wireless mesh…
dmunger | July 25, 2007Imagine you're taking a test--just for fun--to see how fast you can add numbers and alphabetize letters. Would it help you complete the test faster if you had a warning before each item indicating whether you'd be adding or alphabetizing?
Now imagine you're taking the same test--only this time the test will be used to determine whether you qualify for a promotion at work. In this, more stressful situation, do you think the warnings would help? Would you change your strategy on the test?
There is considerable evidence that cognitive performance changes when we are under stress. For example,…
dmunger | July 24, 2007Greta and I have been back from Europe for about 36 hours now, and we're slowly adapting to life back in the US. Sure, the olive oil's not as good, and wine costs a fortune, but amazingly we're finding that we're able to accommodate to these problems, as well as the 7-hour time shift from Athens to Charlotte.
I suppose that shouldn't come as a surprise to us -- after all, the human brain is a remarkably adaptable organ. As many, many blogs have observed, a 44-year-old man, married with kids and holding a steady job, was found to have practically no brain matter in his skull:
Corpus…
dmunger | July 21, 2007I'm sitting in an Athens hotel with a cup of coffee pondering my last few hours in Europe. We've had a fabulous vacation, the longest I've ever taken in my life. At the same time, I'm looking forward to getting home.
I've tried to keep you abreast of the psychology-related events that occurred while we were in Europe, but internet access has been too sketchy, and we've been too busy having fun to post everything. Here are a few random snapshots I never managed to post:
A cool "rainbow cloud" from Tuscany, which I had intended to post as a demonstration of why the spectrum doesn't include all…
dmunger | July 19, 2007[originally posted January 26, 2006]
Kids in America grow up in a society that overwhelmingly believes in life after death. At the same time, these same kids grow up learning more and more about the nature of living organisms, and what makes something living or dead. At some point, these two belief systems inevitably collide: pure religious faith suggests that the soul lives on after death, but pure science suggests that consciousness can only exist in a living brain.
Assuming these kids don't read Pharyngula (in which case all hope of an eternal soul would likely be quickly and rudely…
dmunger | July 17, 2007Let's suppose you're the proprietor of a European tourist attraction. We're not talking about a Louvre or Uffizi here, or even a Leaning Tower of Pisa. No, you're in charge of a hidden gem: the scenic Church of the Saint No One Has Ever Heard Of, or the lovely little Museum of the Famous Artist Which Possesses None of His Famous Works.
Your job is to show why this Saint really is someone important, or why the lesser-known works of the Famous Artist should get broader recognition. You also need to preserve your attraction for future generations, and (most importantly) give yourself a nice…
cogdaily | July 16, 2007This is a guest post by Laura Younger, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
Take a look at these static images from a video clip.
Can you tell what the person is doing? It might be hard to make it out from these still pictures, but when you see the same thing in motion it becomes quite clear. Visit the Biomotion Lab and you'll quickly understand.
What you see is called a point-light display. Lights are attached to joints on the body and filmed while a person is performing an action. The animated display makes it surprisingly clear that this person is walking. But, could a…
cogdaily | July 14, 2007A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings:
[originally posted on September 27, 2005]
All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it.
In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical…
cogdaily | July 12, 2007This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers from Spring of 2007.
Does anything seem stick out about this sentence? I'm sure that if I told you to keep looking for yellow highlighted words, you would not have much trouble finding them in these first few sentences. You could even make it simpler for yourself and just look for any highlighted word. The only highlighted portions are yellow, so what is the difference? Let's say that by now you are used to searching for these highlighted words by just looking for a different color background than just the usual white…
cogdaily | July 11, 2007A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings:
[originally posted on July 11, 2005]
There's something about kids and dogs. The phrase "A boy and his dog" brings up quite a range of images: from the sweetness of Norman Rockwell to what sounds like a truly bizarre movie from 1975. Despite not being a dog-person myself (okay, not being a pet-person at all), I find the results from a study that looked at kids and dogs amazing. Marina Pavlova and her colleagues at the University of Tüebingen were curious about how well kids would understand point-light displays.…
dmunger | July 10, 2007We've been away from the internet for a while now, but finally have a slow connection here in rainy Prague. While in Pisa, however, we were able to avail ourselves of a unique opportunity. The favorite trick of the amateur photographers here is to create the "illusion" of their friend/family member "saving" the tower from falling down, like this, admittedly poor attempt:
I've neglected to instruct Nora on the proper angle to hold her fingers, and I should probably have held the camera lower.
But a different illusion is both easier to create and, I think, more impressive. A similar photo…
cogdaily | July 9, 2007This is a guest post by Christy Tucker, one of Greta's top student writers from Spring of 2007.
Take a look at the following paintings. How alike are they? How can you tell--which clues help you determine similarity? Now, which of these girls are related? If only two of these young girls are related, how would you determine which two? Would they be the same ones that you thought looked very similar?
Laurence Maloney and Maria Dal Martello studied observer's ratings of the similarity between two children's faces in relation to judgments on whether the two are siblings. Do we simply note…
cogdaily | July 7, 2007A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings:
[originally posted on December 14, 2005]
IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ, there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school.
Angela…
dmunger | July 5, 2007A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings:
[originally posted on May 9, 2006]
The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you can:
If English is your native language, you should be much quicker at naming the colors of the first list than the second list. Why? Even though the task is to identify the colors,…
cogdaily | July 2, 2007This is a guest post by Jonathan Leathers, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
Take a look at this word:
MONDAY
What color do you see? Red? Blue?
While you may see nothing unusual, some people report being able to perceive colors associated with different days of the week when they are written down or heard in conversation. This ability is attributed to a phenomenon known as synesthesia, previously thought to be extremely rare. In synesthesia, the human brain interprets one set of sensory stimuli in terms of another; in other words, two senses cross. But synesthesia goes…
cogdaily | June 29, 2007This is a guest post by Martina Mustroph, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Rats are often useful models for understanding human behavior,. Testing drugs on rats before testing them on humans is particularly enticing because it is relatively free of ethical concerns (relative to drugging humans, at least), and the amount of drug required to achieve an effect is relatively small compared to the amount it would take to see an effect in a human. As rats' nervous systems are very similar to the human nervous system, they lend themselves really well to drug studies. Rats have been…
dmunger | June 27, 2007Here in Tuscany, the Munger family has rented a vacation house for a couple of weeks. Typically the day's biggest event is preparing dinner. Otherwise we generally just lounge around the house, admire the view, read, or converse over a glass of wine.
Today we thought we needed a project, so Nora and I decided to try and make our own Sudoku puzzle. It's actually more difficult than you might think. You can't just randomly fill in squares in a grid to make a Sudoku puzzle that works. Then it's another challenge to create a set of clues that will result in one unique solution.
After several…