dmunger | December 19, 2006ScienceBlogs is celebrating its first birthday with a wonderful portrait of the entire ScienceBlogs family. It's not quite a year yet (I think we were officially online on January 11, 2005), but if they're happy to celebrate early, so are we! Greta and I shouldn't be too hard to find in the picture -- but the artwork's a little misleading. Greta looks much better in person, and I look much worse!
It's been a fabulous year, and a wonderful group to work with. In addition to the bloggers, Katherine, Tim, Sarah, and the others who work tirelessly behind the scenes to bring you this site deserve…
dmunger | December 18, 2006The cover story in this month's Scientific American, written by mega-entrepreneur Bill Gates, discusses the future of robotics. In the article Gates describes one of robotics' thorniest problems. Having spent some time working with Lego Mindstorms, I can vouch that it's a tricky one: "how to simultaneously handle all the data coming in from multiple sensors and send the appropriate commands to the robot's motors, a challenge known as concurrency."
Psychologists know the problem by another name: attention. In humans, the problem of attention is so complex that we've barely made headway in…
dmunger | December 16, 2006Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for December 16. 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 December 16, 2006 (AAC version)
Cognitive Daily's weekly podcast for December 16, 2006 (MP3 version)
Cognitive Daily's weekly podcast provides audio versions of each week's CogDaily reports on peer-…
dmunger | December 15, 2006Yesterday's report on gift preferences was the inspiration for this week's study. Are some types of gifts simply inappropriate? If it seems clear that not much thought went into a particular gift, does that make it less "special"?
Or does the simple fact that a gift was given make up for any faux pas on the part of the gift-giver? And can we find any relationship between the type of person receiving a gift and what sort of gifts they find appropriate.
Click here to participate in our study and help us find out.
As usual, the study is brief, with just 5 questions, so it should only take a…
dmunger | December 15, 2006Psychology Today has a trio of articles relating to crime and justice. The first article is possibly the most interesting. It offers some compelling data on the frequency of false confessions:
Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide, a review of one decade's worth of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction.
The article suggests that low-IQ or drug-addicted suspects…
dmunger | December 14, 2006I'm not bitter about this, honest I'm not, but it does often seem that people who know you very well end up buying really lousy gifts. What I really want to find out is this: why do they do that? It turns out, market researchers want to know, too. How can they have a prayer of selling people things they don't want when people can't even convince their loved ones to buy them things they do want?
Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop have designed a clever study to examine this very issue. They wanted to know whether couples who've been together for at least six months were any better at predicting each…
dmunger | December 14, 2006Clinician Dr. Louann Brizendine is quoted in the New York Times as saying that she doesn't do research because "I don't want to give patients a placebo. It's cruel." The interviewer pushes her on the issue, pointing out that in the long term, controlled studies are necessary in order to determine the efficacy of treatments. Her reply: "I am glad someone does it, but I'd rather help each female brain that walks into my clinic walk out in better shape."
Adam Kolber wonders if something might have been lost in the transcription of the interview, but I don't doubt that Brizendine's sentiments may…
dmunger | December 13, 2006Keith Payne's work on racial stereotyping brings up an intriguing possibility. During the weapons identification task, viewers are more likely to erroneously identify a harmless object as a weapon if it was preceded by a black face compared to a white face. They are also more accurate identifying weapons after seeing black faces compared with white faces.
It's possible that both of these results are due to the same underlying mental process, but Payne's research also invites another possible assessment: that separate processes are responsible for the two different behaviors. One behavior:…
dmunger | December 13, 2006How often do you see a face that you know you've seen before, but you simply can't connect a name to? If you're like me, it happens nearly every day. Face recognition experts know this is because our brains are hard-wired to recall specific faces. The semantic information about those faces is stored separately.
But faces are complex -- especially when we need to remember enough about a face to distinguish it from others. If we're presented with just a glimpse of a face, is that enough to place it in memory? A new study by Kim Curby and Isabel Gauthier examined that question:
Study…
dmunger | December 12, 2006
The red oval on the right represents a known eBay fraudster. How can we use that information to locate others? Follow the interactions. Fraudulent eBay users typically build up their online "reputation" by conducting transactions with accomplices who give them phony "positive" feedback. These accomplices, a research team at Carnegie Mellon has found, typically interact with many fraudsters. If an eBay user transacts with many known accomplices, who aren't themselves engaging in fraud but have given positive feedback to fraudsters, then they may be a fraudster themselves. Thus, the two "…
dmunger | December 11, 2006I have a vague memory of having written something about curse words on Cognitive Daily before. However, I'm almost certain I've never written about false memories in children. Maybe something about eyewitness testimony, but not false memories.
You probably know the punch line: I've written about all those things. So why do I remember the study about swearing better than the others?
Chris at Mixing Memory discusses a study which shows that we remember both "taboo words" -- and the context in which they were presented -- better than other words. The six-experiment study involved memorizing…
dmunger | December 10, 2006I promised on Friday that I'd post an update on the half-marathon. First of all, I finished!
Here's a picture of me about 100 yards from the finish with my running partner (and co-author) Shireen Campbell:
I finished the race in 1 hour, 51 minutes, and 59 seconds. That works out to a pace of 8:33 per mile, which is three seconds slower what I was shooting for. Still, I finished in the top third of competitors, and in the top half of my age/gender division, so I'll take it! A few additional thoughts below:
Shireen finished 1 second ahead of me, and 12th out of 75 in her division. Way to go…
dmunger | December 9, 2006A couple new features for this week's podcast. First, a new mic, which I think has a richer sound, but also probably needs a screen to filter out the harsh ps and ts. I'll work on getting one in time for next week's edition. As requested, we're offering the podcast in both AAC and MP3 format. Finally, and most importantly, you can now subscribe to our podcast using the special podcast 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…
dmunger | December 8, 2006CogDaily readers are certainly opinionated about email sign-offs. Last week's Casual Friday study on the topic generated 343 responses, and our post on the study attracted 21 comments, some of them quite impassioned:
When someone signs an email "Cheers", I assume that they are either British or learned English in a British school. If I find out they are American, they get a check in the box marked "douchebag" in my personal catalog of people I know.
Wow! Who knew the stakes of an email sign-off were so high?
So, what is the best email sign-off? Well, according to our readers, the most…
dmunger | December 8, 2006Tomorrow I'll be running my first-ever (and possibly my last) half-marathon. I've been an amateur runner since high school, but the longest race I'd run in previously was a 10K race, less than half this distance, nearly 20 years ago. I haven't run competitively since college, but I have consistently run around three miles a day for nearly that entire span. It was just this summer that I decided to go for the half-marathon, and I've upped my training regimen to include runs as long as 12 miles. But tomorrow's 13.1 mile race will be the longest I've ever run. What can I look forward to?
How…
dmunger | December 7, 2006Very few of us can avoid stereotyping others. When we're actively trying to avoid racial stereotyping, we often end up looking ridiculous. But the very fact that we can try to avoid it suggests that there's something more to racial stereotypes than a "stereotype center" in the brain. If stereotyping was completely automatic, we'd be no more able to resist stereotypes than we are able to stop seeing.
So if we can try to resist stereotyping, why doesn't resisting always work? The article I just linked points to a study showing that people -- even police officers -- are more likely to mistakenly…
dmunger | December 7, 2006The Neurocritic has a fascinating report on recent research exploring memory interference. One of the primary problems with memory is deciding what to remember and what to forget. As an example of the scale of the problem, if we recorded every image we ever saw in its raw format, we'd soon exhaust our memory reserves. And what if we remembered every word we'd ever read, instead of recalling the larger sense of what we learn? Again, eventually we'd run out of space.
When we encounter new images or words, we must decide which memories should be discarded, and which we should keep. Memory…
dmunger | December 6, 2006The notion that thinking faster could make you happy may seem on the face of it absurd. But consider some of the evidence. People with mania, who complain of racing thoughts, often find the sensation exhilarating. When you meet someone who's in a manic phase, they often seem cheerier and more pleasant than anyone you've known.
Research in an entirely different field, music, has found that the tempo of background music played during a test can affect performance in tests of spatial ability. The faster the music, the better the mood of the participants, and the better they performed.
Emily…
dmunger | December 6, 2006When someone gets lost in the woods -- or when a convict escapes from prison -- finding them among the vast expanse of trees and other features can be a daunting task. Often search parties literally walk in lines just a few feet apart to scour the terrain for evidence. But perhaps there's an easier way to find signs of life. When cNet editor James Kim and his family went missing last week somewhere in Oregon, Matt Haughey had an idea about how to find them:
I've seen some pretty amazing stuff come out of MetaFilter, when people collaborate on a real world problem. Then it hit me. There are…
dmunger | December 5, 2006The cafe wall illusion has the dramatic effect of making a straight line appear slanted:
That's right, the line is precisely horizontal. It was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, one of the world's foremost authorities on visual illusion, who is also a wonderful artist. In addition to the hundreds of other illusions he's created, he's posted an entire page of illusions all based on the cafe wall effect.
But why does the line appear to be slanted? It must have something to do with the juxtaposition of light and dark patches, but what exactly? Take a look at this more elaborate illusion which…