dmunger | January 22, 2007Most language processing takes places in the left hemisphere of the brain. When we read, carry on a conversation, or listen to speech, most of the action -- for right-handers -- takes place on the left side of the brain. (For left-handers, the situation is more complex; it's not simply a mirror image of a right-handed brain. For this reason, most studies involving any sort of brain scan routinely exclude left-handers.)
But there are a few occasions when the right hemisphere gets involved: when we create a narrative, for example, or when we make inferences. Some types of figurative language,…
dmunger | January 22, 2007The America versus the World Casual Fridays study was our most popular test yet: The 500 survey slots filled in less than 24 hours. I promised to provide the quiz answers, and you'll find them below.
Some of our readers have asked why we don't allow everyone to respond, and the reason is simple: we have to pay for the survey software, and it costs us 5 cents per response. If one of our studies was linked by a major site such as Digg or Slashdot, that could amount to hundreds of dollars. If anyone knows of a survey site that doesn't have this requirement, please let us know!
That said, I have…
dmunger | January 21, 2007Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for January 21. Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast using the special RSS feed:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml
To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, then paste or type in the URL.
To access the podcast directly, click on the links below:
Cognitive Daily's weekly podcast for January 21, 2007 (AAC version)
Cognitive Daily's weekly podcast for January 21, 2007 (MP3 version)
Cognitive Daily's weekly podcast provides audio versions of each week's CogDaily reports on peer-…
dmunger | January 19, 2007This post on Pharyngula made me realize that most non-Americans really have no occasion to learn the names of U.S. states. As one commenter put it:
That map would be much more useful if it labeled the American states as well. The only ones I can pick off with real certainty are California, Texas, Hawaii and Alaska. I have a good idea of where a lot of the others are generally, but others, I have no idea whereabouts in the US they are. Dakota? No idea. Virginia? Um, in the bottom/east 2/3rds.
It does make sense that non-Americans wouldn't have learned the names of all the U.S. states, but with…
dmunger | January 19, 2007Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame) has written a series of articles for the Wall Street Journal on intelligence (available free here). One frustrating aspect of the articles is that Murray doesn't cite his sources. Consider this statement:
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance…
dmunger | January 18, 2007
A group of bloggers has begun an initiative to post on science only for the week beginning February 5. We're in, but then again, that's what we do every week!
Everything you want to know about the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference this weekend. We'll be there.
Everything you want to know about the Science Blogging Anthology. Corturnix really is good at these encyclopedic posts, isn't he?
Two new ScienceBlogs, both medical-related: Sign Out and ScienceToLife.
A great new (to me) blog on "cognitive robotics."
Truly bizarre: In some cases, shorter visual searches are more accurate than…
dmunger | January 18, 2007Last week's post on how sound affects perception of visual events was the most popular post ever on Cognitive Daily, with over 15,000 visits. This was thanks to links from both Fark's technology page and digg.com. Yet commenters on both sites expressed disappointment with the demo. I wasn't especially happy with it either, but then again, I didn't realize that more people would look at that one post than visited the site in all of February last year!
The problem with the movie is that it's showing two conflicting phenomena. Turn your sound down and watch the movie:
Even though the motion…
dmunger | January 18, 2007Over at Developing Intelligence, Chris Chatham has a fascinating discussion of infantile amnesia, which he tantalizingly terms a "myth." Chris cites research demonstrating that infants can and do remember things, even stories read to them in the womb:
3-day-old infants were capable of distinguishing a particular passage (from Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat") that had been read to them twice daily for the last 6 weeks of gestation from similar passages (matched for word count, length, and prosody). What's more, these infants preferred the familiar passage even if spoken by someone other than…
dmunger | January 17, 2007
Industry-sponsored articles in medical journals are likely to be ghost-authored. Most often, data analysis is conducted by a person not listed among the study's authors.
New study explores why people believe conspiracy theories. Or so "they" want you to believe.
Stanford Prison Experiment on YouTube. I read the study many years ago, and that was enough for me. But if you haven't, or if you're still curious, take a look.
The concept of "nothing" existed before "zero".
"Scroll through and look for fireworks": Should neuroimaging be used more often for preventive medicine?
Note: We're trying…
dmunger | January 17, 2007Here in North Carolina, for many sports fans, it's considered common knowledge that basketball referees don't call fouls against Duke. The reasons for the supposed bias vary from racism, to payoffs from wealthy alums, to the intimidating atmosphere at Duke's legendary Cameron Indoor Stadium, but nearly everyone in the state who's not a Duke fan seems to believe that the rich northerners at Duke University get all sorts of unfair advantages.
That said, accusations of bias in sports officials aren't limited to the Atlantic Coast Conference. Studies on home field advantage in Major League…
dmunger | January 17, 2007At 15, our son Jim is taller than average for his age. Indeed, he's as tall as me, as this photo illustrates. Our daughter Nora is below average height, 4' 11" at 13 years old, but still squarely in the normal range. But what happens when a child is well below normal -- when, say, a boy's growth puts him on track to be less than five feet tall as an adult?
Some studies have suggested that shorter men are likely to earn less and be at greater risk for psychological problems. As a recent L.A. Times article suggests, conventional wisdom has it that short women are treated condescendingly, and…
dmunger | January 16, 2007I noticed from last week's mega comment thread and also from the referrer log that many of CogDaily's visitors read the blog via Google Reader. Wondering what all the fuss was about, I tried it out over the weekend. It certainly seems to be a serviceable reader, very similar in appearance and function to Bloglines. However, when I gave it the full workout for the "In other news" segment this morning, it crashed my browser, so it's back to Bloglines for me.
This all got me to wondering: How do CogDaily readers access the site? I use three different methods to track visits to Cognitive Daily (…
dmunger | January 16, 2007Bora Zivcovic has just accomplished the impossible. He has not only sorted through hundreds of pearls to find those that dazzled most brilliantly, he's also tamed legions of wild rats, herded a flock of irascible cats and squirrels, and done it in just three weeks, all without mixing a single metaphor. That's right, Bora has created an anthology of the 50 best science blog posts from 2006. It's called The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs from 2006, and Greta and I are exceedingly proud that one of our posts (actually written in 2005) has been selected for inclusion.
The book…
dmunger | January 13, 2007Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for January 13. Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast using the special RSS feed:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml
To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, then paste or type in the URL. (We believe we've resolved the problems we've had with the RSS feed over the past few weeks. Let us know if you continue to experience problems.)
To access the podcast directly, click on the links below:
Cognitive Daily's weekly podcast for January 13, 2007 (AAC version)
Cognitive Daily's weekly…
dmunger | January 12, 2007Nonsignificance is the bane of every researcher. They know they've got an effect, but those darned statistics prove otherwise. In cognitive psychology, the standard for significance is p < .05, which means, essentially, that there's a 5 percent chance that the results are simply due to chance, instead of revealing a bona-fide phenomenon. For this week's Casual Friday, try as I may, I just couldn't find a significant effect.
The idea was straightforward enough. We based our design on a really cool study from Gillian Rhodes' lab, which found that by repeatedly exposing viewers to fatter-than…
dmunger | January 12, 2007Thank you to the dozens of readers who took me up on my offer yesterday to give a personal response to every comment or question. As of this writing, I've got two comments left to respond to, and at that point I'm going to declare the offer expired (no complaints--you had your chance! And I've got to analyze this week's Casual Friday results at some point). This post is now actually the most active post on the entire ScienceBlogs network, so thanks again for all your great questions!
If you haven't had a chance to read through the questions, I'd encourage you to do so -- there are plenty of…
dmunger | January 11, 2007Over the past year, CogDaily has had about 400,000 unique visits. During that same time, we've received 3,075 comments. Wow! We're humbled by those numbers. Yet simple division reveals that fewer than 1 in 100 visits actually results in a comment. There must be hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of visitors to this site who've never commented on a single post.
Today I'd like to change that, with a simple offer: Write a comment, and I will respond, thoughtfully. You can ask me any question, comment on any topic, and I'll write you a personalized response, in complete sentences. No question is…
dmunger | January 10, 2007We've written a lot about video games and aggression here on CogDaily, and typically there has been heated discussion about the results. Why, commenters ask, aren't you talking about aggression in football players, or road rage, or in any of a thousand other situations? The most important reason is simply that we have a teenage son who loves video games, so we want to know if there's a negative impact of playing these games all the time.
But our commenters do have a point: a larger understanding of aggressive behavior and violence clearly goes beyond simply playing video games. There was…
dmunger | January 10, 2007For some reason I can't resist watching Steve Jobs' Apple keynote speeches. I watched six years ago when he introduced the iPod, and I watched again last night when he introduced his latest "revolutionary" product. People were amazed when the iPod was introduced -- but a little shocked by the price. I didn't buy an iPod then, but I finally did break down and buy a $99 shuffle when it was released a year or two back.
So what about the iPhone? By all accounts, it's an amazing device, offering not only a telephone, but also email, messaging, a beautiful web browser, and of course, iPod…
dmunger | January 9, 2007In movie fight scenes, punches often miss by a foot or more, but when sound effects are added, and the punchee adds an effective-looking recoil, we're convinced that the punch is "real." We've posted on this phenomenon before: when a "click" sound is played as two animated balls pass by each other, it's perceived as a "bounce."
This type of sound effect, where the sound occurs at a critical moment in an animation or movie, has been explored quite extensively. But is it possible that other types of sound might affect how we see motion? Adam Ecker and Laurie Heller realized that they could…