dmunger | May 25, 2007Last week we wondered whether sports fans and arts buffs were nonintersecting groups. I knew there were some exceptions to the idea that an arts snob wouldn't set foot inside an athletic complex. For example, a friend of mine is an art history professor, but also such a big football fan that in his spare time he serves as an equipment manager (read "cleans soiled jockstraps") for the Carolina Panthers. Despite exceptions like this, we wanted to know if on the whole the stereotype was true. There's also a second possibility, one which was borne out by our results: perhaps some people like to…
dmunger | May 24, 2007I don't know what I expected to see when I posted yesterday's poll about people's work schedules, but I didn't expect to find this. With over 250 responses, fewer than half of our respondents said they work a standard 8-5 Monday-Friday schedule.
It's possible that Cognitive Daily's readership isn't representative of the population at large (we've got a disproportionate number of students), but based on our sample, 52 percent of people don't work 8-5 every day. Using the poll results, it's easy to calculate how many people we expect to see out and about during the workweek. At any given time…
dmunger | May 23, 2007The visual system is very good at noticing a new object coming into view. However, the system isn't perfect. If a second object appears near the first one, it takes a little longer to spot it. This phenomenon, known as inhibition of return, has been well-documented. We discussed it in a 2005 post:
If an object appears in one part of our field of view, it temporarily delays our ability to detect another object appearing near it. The effect begins about a third of a second after the first object appears and lasts about a second. If the second object appears sooner than that, we actually notice…
dmunger | May 23, 2007Jason Kottke points to an interesting article about why so many people seem to be hanging out in cafes, coffee shops, and parks in the middle of the day while "normal" people are working. Everyone seems to have a different reason:
"Jeffrey" (some names changed at owner's request), writing a poem in a notebook on Church Street, had quit his California Pizza Kitchen job that morning; he was down to a barista gig now. The poem was about knots. With extreme reluctance he conceded to hailing from Fresno. There was "no love" at his pizza job.
"I get Wednesdays off," said Kim Anderson, 29, an…
dmunger | May 22, 2007When Joanne Rowling sat in an Edinburgh coffee shop, nearly broke, her baby sleeping nearby in a stroller, penning a fantastic story about a school for wizards, could anyone have predicted that she would soon be the most successful novelist in history?
Certainly not the twelve publishers who rejected her manuscript before Bloomsbury finally offered her a trifling £1,500 advance for a work that would ultimately become the basis for a billion-dollar publishing empire.
Probability expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes that our inability to predict blockbuster successes like Harry Potter is…
dmunger | May 21, 2007A fascinating study has just found that hearing one person's opinion repeated is almost as effective as hearing several different people's opinions.
Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.
The researchers had over a thousand student volunteers read statements that were supposed to represent…
dmunger | May 21, 2007Last week we reported on our site statistics after going to a full RSS feed. The results were disappointing; our numbers went down. We said we'd continue the experiment for another week to see if the trend was reversed once more people heard about the option of viewing all CogDaily content in RSS feeds.
Now, after another week of full RSS feeds, we have more results to report. These results confirm what we found last week: while RSS subscriptions are up, page views are down:
The dotted line represents the date we switched to full RSS feeds, and as you can see, the trend continues. Last…
dmunger | May 18, 2007Are sports fans ignorant about the arts? Do opera buffs have trouble distinguishing a fastball from a slider? Greta has never been much of a sports fan, but she loves taking in the arts, cultural events, and Broadway shows. I know lots of sports fans who've never heard an opera. Are sports and fine art mutually exclusive?
If this is a rule, there's at least one exception: I love sports, but I also enjoy visiting museums and listening to the symphony. But maybe I'm not as uncommon as it seems. Maybe lots of people enjoy both fine arts and sports. Now's our chance to find out. This week's…
dmunger | May 18, 2007Much research has found that there are IQ differences based on socioeconomic background of children: poorer children have lower IQs. But it's possible that these differences may be due to health problems in some groups: if poor kids are more likely to get sick, wouldn't that have some impact on their mental abilities as well?
A new study tries to control for that problem by identifying extremely healthy kids from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds:
To find a group of healthy children, the NIH researchers screened more than 35,000 youngsters for medical, neurologic and psychiatric…
dmunger | May 17, 2007Check this out:
As you might guess, all these bands are actually horizontal, but the stripes cause each band to be perceived as sloping up or down. But take a closer look: the top pair of bands appears to be getting closer together as you move from left to right, while the bottom pair appears to be getting farther apart. Yet the stripes on each pair of bands are slanted in the same direction: the only thing that makes the bands appear to slope in different directions is the frequency of the stripes.
I found this illusion via David Whitaker's web site. Whitaker submitted one of the top ten…
dmunger | May 16, 2007Lots of news outlets are buzzing about a new stand-up treadmill workstation. The idea is that you work standing up for part of the day, walking at a very slow pace, burning calories but still getting just as much done. Here's a photo from the Cleveland Leader:
My first thought is "how could I possibly get any work done standing on that contraption?", but results of an initial study suggest that workers are just as productive:
The authors add that the study participants found the equipment easy to use and were able to work normally, to the extent that they wanted to continue using it after…
dmunger | May 15, 2007When Greta earned her Ph.D. 13 years ago, Jim was two and a half years old, and Nora was just 10 months old. Jim knew a few words, and Nora couldn't talk at all. You might think a baby as young as Nora wouldn't have an appreciation for music or dance. If you can't walk, what good is dancing?
But babies -- and Nora was no exception -- love to be bounced. Bouncing her on your knee would elicit peals of laughter. Is this love of rhythmic bouncing somehow related to an appreciation of music?
Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel Trainor developed an ingenious study to see if babies even younger than…
dmunger | May 15, 2007The emoticon for "smile" in most western cultures is this :). One of the ScienceBloggers does it backwards (: (can you guess who?), but the symbol is essentially the same. In Japan, however, the smile is depicted like this: ^_^.
You might think that's just because the traditions evolved separately, but emotion researcher Masaki Yuki doesn't buy it. He argues that the difference in Japanese emoticons is related to cultural differences in real smiles.
when Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons…
dmunger | May 14, 2007For the past week, we've been conducting a little experiment with Cognitive Daily. In the past, we've had several readers complain that we don't include the full post in the RSS feed for CogDaily, so last week we published every post in its entirety on RSS (if you don't know what RSS is, I explain it below). Today I'm going to share the results of that experiment.
There are two primary philosophies about RSS feeds. The first one says that the point of RSS is just to alert users to new content. Users don't want to read content using their RSS reader; they'll visit the original web site to do…
dmunger | May 11, 2007I'm a fast typist, but Greta types much faster than me. I've taken a few years of piano lessons, but Greta could read music before she could read, and she still plays oboe and English horn with the Davidson College Symphony Orchestra. Could her 30+ years of musical training be the reason she's a faster typist?
This week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by my observations about my personal typing quirks, but it quickly morphed into a new justification for music lessons. Commenter (and perception of music blogger) Scott Spiegelberg felt his musical training might have had something to do…
dmunger | May 10, 2007In education school, I was taught that the purpose of grading was to rank-order students -- to create a system whereby the highest-achieving students were ranked at the top and the lowest-achieving students were at the bottom. But recently there have been worries that grade inflation is making it difficult to use grades to rank students.
At most Ivy League schools, nearly 50 percent of grades given are A or A minus. When dozens of students have perfect GPAs, how do you determine who is best? If the average GPA at a school is 3.4, then what's the point of having a four-point scale: half the…
dmunger | May 9, 2007"I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently that certainly there must be a grain of truth to it. Yet it certainly isn't the case that car drivers can't see such obstacles -- after all, they can see traffic signals that are much smaller than a bike or a motorcycle.
What they mean to say is that their attention was otherwise engaged -- perhaps by a phone conversation, perhaps by other traffic, or perhaps because…
dmunger | May 9, 2007In Star Wars, the real hero might be R2D2 -- the only character who makes it through all six episodes without falling to the "dark side" of the force. R2D2 is a robot, but everyone in the film treats "him" like a person, even commending him for "bravery." As viewers, we don't have a problem with that. R2D2 was Jim's favorite character -- he even had a stuffed animal version of the robot to sleep with.
But as real robots become more a part of society, will we form human bonds with them? It's already happening; the Washington Post has the details. U.S. soldiers who regularly use robots as…
dmunger | May 8, 2007Take a look at these two pictures. Who is more dangerous?
It's not hard to decide, although I wouldn't hurt a fly, and Nora, even at age three, could be brutal with her sarcasm. Now, what's the most dangerous situation?
Again, an easy decision. While Carhenge is certainly an awe-inspiring monument (and perhaps Jim could scratch himself on one of those cars), Nora's descent of this rock spire gives me shivers.
You might think that there aren't many differences in how adults judge threats in examples such as this, but there is some reason to believe that older adults may have a different…
dmunger | May 8, 2007A new blog has emerged in Terre Haute, Indiana. Its message is somewhat cryptic, including such gems as this one, from "annefernald":
For those who think of surgeons as spending their days operating on people, this would definitely not be Dr. Johnson....Not, in fact a medical doctor at all, the wit and writer is constantly trailed by a companion, one Boswell, who does most of his writing for him.
What's the point of all this? It's a protest of sorts, inspired by a recent article in the New York Times discussing the decline of book review sections in newspapers, and the rising role blogs are…