cogdaily | June 27, 2007[originally posted on February 2, 2006]
In connection to Monday's posting, Other-race faces: Why do they seem different?, I thought readers would be interested in a post from early last year concerning implicit attitudes on race. The link to the original post is above if you would like to see previous comments.
Twelve years ago, Greta and I were awakened by a rattling on the door of our Bronx apartment. It was about three A.M.; our children were asleep in the next room. "What should I do?" Greta whispered to me. She had woken first and was holding the deadbolt on the door locked so the…
cogdaily | June 25, 2007This is a guest post by Rivka Ihejirika, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Do you find it harder to recognize the face of someone from a race other than your own? Does it take you longer to recall the face of someone from an unfamiliar race? Some researchers believe that we are born with a predisposition to process faces of those from our own race better than faces from other races. Other researchers believe that the own-race face bias is not innate, but we develop a preference for the race of those in our immediate environment. People of all ages demonstrate the bias to…
cogdaily | June 22, 2007Yesterday was the summer solstice, and the days are getting shorter; but before you go out and enjoy the sun this weekend: Is sunshine good for you?
In other news:
AMA weighs in on gaming and internet addiction
Coffee 'could prevent eye tremor'
Brain's inertial navigation system pinpointed
What's killing American honey bees?
Labelling emotions reduces their impact
Natalie Portman, cognitive neuroscientist
The psychology of fatherhood
Video: The earth without humans
cogdaily | June 21, 2007This is a guest post by Laura Younger, one of Greta's top student writers from Spring 2007
Everyone has heard of the concept of reinforcement. You reinforce your child with dessert after finishing his or her vegetables; you praise your dog with ear scratches for not barking at the mailman; or you give yourself a little TV time for cleaning the bathroom. It's a system that often works, but what types of behaviors can be reinforced? We know that learning can be improved with reinforcement, but is external reinforcement required for learning to occur? A team of researchers led by Aaron Seitz…
dmunger | June 20, 2007Euro-update 4: Sperm whale perception
Tuscany is about the last place you might think to go to speculate about the visual system of a whale, but when you're spending three weeks relaxing in a secluded villa, you have a lot of reading time. I've been reading Moby-Dick.
Herman Melville describes the sperm whale with almost obsessive detail in the book, from the shape of its tail to the nature of its skin.
In one chapter, devoted to contrasting the head of the right whale and the sperm whale, we find amazing speculation about both the human and sperm whale visual system. Remember, this was…
cogdaily | June 19, 2007[originally posted on April 20, 2006]
If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there…
cogdaily | June 18, 2007This is a guest post by David Kerns, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
As movie special effects technology improves, more and more live-action shots are being replaced with computer animation. Harry Potter flies across the Quidditch field; Spider-Man swings from web to web through the cityscape of New York City, and miniaturized Hobbits fight the overpowering Orcs of Middle-earth. All of these are examples of human movements that have been reconstructed with computer animation. But sometimes this type of animation fails to come across as real. When Harry falls from his…
cogdaily | June 15, 2007This is a guest post by Martina Mustroph, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
When you're typing, your senses of touch, hearing, and sight align. You feel, see, and hear your fingers touch the keyboard. Now imagine that you are outdoors and you feel a drop of water hit your hand. If you are like me, then it probably immediately occurs to you that it was a raindrop, so you stretch out your hand to see if more will come, and you look up at the sky for menacing clouds. Let's say the sky is blue and clear as far as you can see. Now your senses of touch and sight are at odds: your…
cogdaily | June 14, 2007"What was your 6th birthday party like?
"If you successfully retrieved that memory, you may now be ever so slightly less able to remember your other childhood birthdays. A variety of behavioral evidence has shown that such "retrieval induced forgetting" of strongly competing memories is fundamental to memory retrieval."
A fascinating article was posted over at the Developing Intelligence ScienceBlog discussing how retrieving an old memory can compete with the ability to later recall similar memories. This competition is said to assist in selective memory retrieval, and reduce metabolically…
dmunger | June 13, 2007We've been in Rome for a few days now, and we've seen several wonderful examples of how Renaissance and Baroque artists were beginning to re-learn the lessons of perspective, which, if 20-year-old memory of art history class serves me, had been discarded during the medieval period while artists focused on the social and religious dimensions of art.
Realistic perspective in paintings requires artists to understand a lot about the human vision system. If you can accurately portray perspective, you might just be able to build a jumbo-sized cathedral on a moderate-sized budget.
The most ambitious…
cogdaily | June 11, 2007This is a guest post by Suzie Eckl, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Forget color television.
Before we had color, we had black and white. Before we had movies, we had photographs. And before photographs we had...
Engravings?
Prior to August 19, 1839, the date Daguerre and Niepce revealed that they had created the world's first photograph, artists had all the control in reproducing the world as they saw it. Many artists chose not painting or sculpture but engraving. They carved their images into wood or burned them into metal.
In a fascinating analysis, Danielle Zavagno…
dmunger | June 8, 2007We've spent an exciting week in Paris, seeing all the fabulous sites, from the Louvre to the Tour Eiffel.
Today we decided to do something different and headed for the Georges Pompidou Center, where the national galleries of modern art are housed. Some fascinating stuff there, including some works which attempted to question the very nature of art itself. Jim was particularly perplexed by this piece:
The work consisted of three panels, painted completely white. The artist insisted that the color white represented nothing at all. Is this art?
And what about this?
Another work, of similar…
cogdaily | June 7, 2007This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
How well do you think you can navigate through these woods?
How about when your field of view is significantly reduced?
When external information such as sight is decreased, our ability to make our way to a goal while avoiding obstacles will understandably be impaired.But when we lose all visual information we can still make mental representations, or "mental maps" of our surroundings. Even blind individuals compare with those who can see in tasks such as recreating large scale representations of…
cogdaily | June 5, 2007This is a guest post by Aaron Couch, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
When looking out a window, or watching a movie in a theater, the image you see is typically presented as right-side-up. Let's say though, that you're lying on your side in bed and looking out a window at your backyard. Both your internal gravity sense organs and the orientation of scenery (trees, buildings) tell you that you're actually seeing a "tilted" image, and your mind immediately tells you which part of the scene is "up".
In a similar vein, a team led by Ian P. Howard performed research that…
cogdaily | June 4, 2007Hello Cognitive Daily readers!
As you may have already read, I have been hired by Dave and Greta as the Cognitive Daily summer intern while they're away on vacation for the next couple of months, so I thought I'd give a brief introduction. My name is Aaron Couch and I am a junior student at Davidson College in North Carolina, majoring in both Psychology and Economics. I have been a long time reader of the blog (off and on for the last three years), was part of Greta's "Psychology Goes to the Movies" seminar this past semester, and she's also my major advisor. I am staying in the town of…
dmunger | June 2, 2007I'm reporting from sunny, temperate Paris. Gorgeous weather here, and we've already taken in a few sights.
However, the first psychology-related photo op actually occurred on the plane on the way over here. Why is Greta scowling in this picture?
She's holding a catalog page from the SkyMall catalog, where travelers can order useless gizmos from the discomfort of their airline seats. Here's a close-up of the offending catalog item.
There's a doozy of a psychological error in the claims made for this product. Can you spot it? Let us know in the comments.
dmunger | June 1, 2007This post is scheduled to appear the moment our plane takes off for a very extended vacation to Europe. We'll be gone for seven weeks, but we won't be abandoning Cognitive Daily. We've scheduled two extended research posts to appear each week, each written by one of Greta's top student writers and carefully edited for accuracy and readability by both me and Greta.
Aaron Couch, the Cognitive Daily intern, will be here to help manage the comment discussion threads, post news items, and make sure there aren't any technical glitches.
I'll also be hauling my computer along for the journey, so…
dmunger | May 31, 2007More and more studies are online these days, which means that researchers can find a whole new array of participants for their studies, and anyone who's interested can become a real part of cutting-edge research.
But how can researchers find interested research subjects -- and how can people who want to participate find the studies that are interesting to them? We think we might be able to help. If you're conducting an online psychology study, or really any study that can be conducted remotely, just put all the vital details in a comment below.
Your study will appear in the "recent comments"…
dmunger | May 30, 2007There's been lots of commentary online about Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg's article about why children (and adults) often resist learning scientific information. Deric Bownds gives the money quote from the article:
Resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and it will be especially strong if there is a nonscientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are thought of as…
dmunger | May 29, 2007With the preparations for Europe going on at full steam, I find myself drawn toward psychology articles about traveling. Take, for example, this article in Scientific American. Kaushik Basu explains the "traveler's dilemma," a scenario in which identical items purchased by two travelers are both damaged in transit. The airline agent is worried that they'll claim the price of the item is higher than what they actually paid, so he devises the following scheme:
He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both…