dmunger | May 7, 2007Many studies of the electrical activity in the brain have found consistent differences in activity when people look at faces compared to other stimuli such as cars or tools. This has led some researchers to conclude that face processing is fundamentally different from other visual processing. But a recent study has found some evidence to challenge that notion, and the Phineas Gage Fan Club has the details:
Many studies have compared faces presented at the same angle and size to a control category, presented with widely differing angle and size. If you then find that based on your study,…
dmunger | May 4, 2007It used to be that everyone who needed to type took typing class in school. I was probably part of the last generation that actually learned on a typewriter rather than a computer: we clacked for 55 minutes a day in Mr. Butler's room full of IBM Selectrics. No correction keys, either: if you made a mistake, you had to retype the whole thing.
But even though Mr. Butler drilled us incessantly about proper typing form, I still have a few typing quirks. I don't use the proper finger to type "backspace," and I'm not properly ambidextrous with the space bar.
This got me to thinking. Does "proper…
dmunger | May 4, 2007They say exercise can help you lose weight. What they didn't tell you is how much exercise.
A new study offers the depressing truth: more than you ever imagined. Thousands of volunteers reported their weight and exercise regimens over a seven-year period. Here are the results:
25-to-34-year-old men gained 1.4 pounds annually if they ran less than 15 miles per week. In addition, male runners gained 0.8 pounds annually if they ran between 15 and 30 miles per week, and 0.6 pounds annually if they ran more than 30 miles per week.
Even running four miles a day three times a week couldn't prevent…
dmunger | May 4, 2007Cognitive Daily now has a facebook profile.
I've never done facebook and I don't know how active this will be, but perhaps some of our readers are facebook users and this will be a way for you to connect with each other. There's also a ScienceBlogs fan club on facebook, so that's another way to get to know some of the people you may only currently recognize in comments threads here.
dmunger | May 3, 2007How many moving objects can you keep track of at once? Clicking on the image below will take you to Lana M. Trick's web site, where she has a nifty demo of a multi-object tracking task. You're asked to keep track one to four of the smiley-faces as they move randomly around the screen. Then when the faces stop moving, you click on the ones you were supposed to follow. Go ahead, give it a try!
You'll notice there are four levels of difficulty. Most adults can, with a little practice, track four out of ten randomly moving objects for ten seconds -- they fall apart when there are more than…
dmunger | May 3, 2007Fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer has a nice article on the new respect cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have for emotion. Here's an excerpt:
Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.
"Because we subscribed to this false ideal of…
dmunger | May 2, 2007Yesterday the preeminent socially generated news site, digg.com, nearly exploded. The way the site is supposed to work is that users submit links to stories (and web sites, photos, and videos) they think will be interesting, and others give those stories a thumbs-up (a "digg") or thumbs-down. If enough users digg a story, it will be promoted to the top of the front page, and this constantly-updated page will reflect a diversity of interesting stories from around the world.
Ideally, this system is completely controlled by Digg's users, and the only interference from "management" is to remove…
dmunger | May 1, 2007Kevin Granata, one of the authors of the work described here, was killed in in the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.
A back injury can destroy a person's life. The pain can be so excruciating that even "passive" activities like sitting up to read a book become intolerable. Whether you work in a steel mill or sit at a desk, a back injury can make it impossible for you to earn a living. Even worse, for many of those who suffer with chronic back injury, is that because it's difficult for others to see what's wrong, there's a tendency to not believe the problem is "real."
Yet there…
dmunger | May 1, 2007This month's issue of Seed magazine features an interview, or really more of a discussion between music researcher Daniel Levitin and David Byrne. Even better, you can read the whole article online!
Byrne has been one of my musical heroes for decades now, and Levitin is a phenomenal researcher who really knows how to write. I'm about two-thirds of the way through his book This Is Your Brain on Music now, and I'm very much enjoying the read.
So how does the interview go? It reads a little awkwardly -- you get the sense that Byrne and Levitin just sat down for a somewhat choreographed chat, and…
dmunger | April 30, 2007Context. It can make all the difference in the world. The word "suck" can describe the action of a vacuum cleaner or a sex act that was illegal in the state of North Carolina until 2003.
Following our analysis of last Friday's curse word study, several of the commenters pointed out that without the context for a particular curse word, it's difficult to say whether or not the word is offensive. Heck, calling someone a "cow" can be awfully offensive in the right (or, should I say wrong) context.
There's no question these people are right. Yet on the other hand, the U.S. government has often…
dmunger | April 30, 2007The post on showing only part of the RSS feeds has attracted quite a lot of attention, including some rather strident comments, such as this one from "Aurora":
How lazy are some people? What kind of society do we live in where people are too f**ing annoyed to click a mouse button to read an entire article?
But Christopher Davis offered a compelling response:
Perhaps you can tell me how to "click through" when I'm reading RSS feeds on my PDA on the subway. Not all applications have always-on connectivity.
Excellent point. But I wonder how many people really do read RSS feeds offline. Sounds…
dmunger | April 30, 2007I know, I know, I promised more analysis of the results from last Friday's curse word study, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Busy, busy, busy. In the meantime, you can head over to Word Munger and read about my hike in Mount Rogers Wilderness last week (click on the photo!):
I should have a post up that offers additional analysis of the Casual Friday results -- and responds to some of your objections -- later today.
dmunger | April 27, 2007Last week's Casual Fridays study was the most popular ever: Despite its grueling 58-question length, over 750 respondents completed the entire thing. We got so much data on foul language that I probably won't finish writing all of it up today.
As you might suspect, in reporting these results it's really impossible to avoid using the offensive words themselves, so if you think you might be offended, I'd recommend not reading any further. One thing our results confirmed, however: if you're like most people who completed the survey, you don't find most of these words generally offensive, so read…
dmunger | April 27, 2007
Very young children learn better from photos. When they are read to from a picture book describing how to make a rattle, 18-months-old do better at trying to make the rattle when the book had realistic photos compared to line drawings. I've always found instructions that use photos very difficult to follow because it's hard to highlight the relevant portion of the photo. But apparently at a very young age, children don't understand the relationship between a drawing and a real object.
Left-handers have faster connections between brain hemispheres. I knew it! Left-handers are superior! But…
dmunger | April 26, 2007There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you would if you averted your gaze.
The problem arises when you address a group of people. How do you pick who to engage visually? Most public speakers are encouraged to look around the room, alternating eye contact with individuals in the audience. But there's no way to look at everyone at once -- so…
dmunger | April 26, 2007When Shelley Batts wrote up a report on an article about antioxidants in fruits, she never expected to get contacted by the copyright police, but that's exactly what happened. She had reproduced a table and a figure from the article, and got this notice from an editorial assistant at the publisher:
The above article contains copyrighted material in the form of a table and graphs taken from a recently published paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. If these figures are not removed immediately, lawyers from John Wiley & Sons will contact you with further action.
She…
dmunger | April 25, 2007Last week's Casual Fridays study filled up so quickly that many of those who wanted to participate weren't able to. This was due to our survey provider's limits on the number of responses. After a preliminary look at the data, it does look like it would be helpful if we could get more respondents.
Now I've located a survey provider that allows us to collect unlimited responses, so for $15, it seemed worth it to give this new provider a shot. If everyone likes the new survey site, we'll ditch the old one and go with this one. However, I'd ask that if you've participated in this study…
dmunger | April 24, 2007The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show you how it works. Just follow the directions on the opening screen:
Now, which letter did you see first? Let's make this a poll:
If we manage to replicate the effect, there should be a bias in the results, which I'll explain below so everyone has a chance to try it out before learning the "answer."
In the 1960s, Jacob Beck found that when searching arrays of letters like this, viewers were…
dmunger | April 24, 2007Penalty kicks are nearly universally reviled among soccer fans, yet they remain an important part of the game. The sport is so exhausting that extending it beyond 30 minutes of extra time in a playoff game could be dangerous for the players. Typically in playoff or championship matches, tie games get decided by a penalty kick competition.
But penalty kicks offer such an advantage to the shooter that it often seems like dumb luck when a goalkeeper manages to make a save. The usual strategy is simply to dive randomly to the left or right, and hope you guessed right. Why not just flip a coin to…
dmunger | April 23, 2007One of the most hated practices on the Internet is the breaking of articles into pages. Jason Kottke swearingly rants against it here, and Mike Davidson denounces the practice here. I don't much like the practice either, especially when a short, pointless article is broken into four or more pages (Davidson mockingly points to this extreme example).
Davidson argues that only extremely long articles -- more than 20 screens long -- should be broken up into pages, and these pages should correspond to logical divisions within the article, which he calls "acts" (I'd call them "chapters" or "…