dmunger | November 14, 2006 If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a few miles from each other develop such different attitudes?…
dmunger | November 14, 2006Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink -- and the real research it was based on -- made quite a splash when it was unveiled: the idea that a teacher evaluation made in just 30 seconds could actually reliably predict teacher performance over an entire semester was certainly surprising.
The Charlotte Observer has an excellent article about how the methods pioneered by Ambady and Rosenthal are being applied in real high school classrooms. Rather than 30 seconds, principals take 3 minutes to assess each teacher's performance, to catch problems early and intervene before they adversely affect the classroom…
dmunger | November 13, 2006There's an interesting site up which claims to be able to test whether or not you are tone deaf (the technical term for this condition is amusia). Though I'm not a music expert, I took the test, and in my opinion it really was testing my ability to determine the difference between similar musical phrases, so I'd highly recommend it.
Test your musical skills in 6 minutes
The only problem with the site is that it doesn't offer any way to compare your results with those of others who've taken the test. To rectify that situation, I've added a poll below. We'll at least have an idea of how…
dmunger | November 10, 2006Given all the interest in PowerPoint lately, we thought it might be a good time to devote a Casual Friday to PowerPoint. Specifically, can we learn more from much-maligned PowerPoint, or is good ol' text better?
We've designed a study that will present some information in PowerPoint form and some information in text form. Then we'll give you a short quiz on the results. If we get enough responses, we should have a definitive answer to the question of whether PowerPoint is a good way to disseminate information.
The whole thing should take just a few minutes of your time.
You'll need a couple…
dmunger | November 10, 2006Quick question for those more computer-savvy than I am. Can you help me divide readers into five roughly equal groups (it's for this week's Casual Friday). In the past, I've relied on the "what month is your birthday in" question, but it won't work when I need five groups.
Surely there's a simple javascript out there that would automatically return a random number from 1 to 5. I've done a few searches, but most of the scripts I could find have been too complicated, requiring user input. I just want the number to be automatically generated according to my specifications.
If you know how to do…
dmunger | November 10, 2006If you're like me, sometimes you feel as if you couldn't get anything done at all if it weren't for coffee. I'm sipping from a cup right now as I write this (a double Americano, in case you're curious). Caffeine seems to perk me up just enough to organize my thoughts into a coherent whole.
But Hugo at AlphaPsy points out that caffeine's effects aren't all good. If you give a spider a large dose, her web will be a random mess instead of a beautiful spiral. Even more fascinating are the human responses to arguments while under the influence of caffeine:
In these experiments, people were made…
dmunger | November 9, 2006Babel's Dawn is providing coverage of the Cradle of Language conference in South Africa. Several presenters at the conference are challenging the idea that language arose from a single genetic mutation. Given the complexity of human language, such a finding would certainly be a surprise to me.
It's tempting to argue that since there appears to be a "universal grammar" -- that all modern languages share some basic similarities -- they must have stemmed from the same genetic mutation. The evidence doesn't appear to be in the single-mutation advocates' favor:
In an afternoon session, Bernard…
dmunger | November 8, 2006Barry Schwartz has an interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, where he claims that basic psychology leads us to choose bland representatives in government instead of fiery leaders.
Schwartz argues that how we choose leaders depends on the framing of the question. If we focus on the positives of a candidate, we're more likely to choose a more interesting, dynamic leader:
What that means is that if you want to win an election, you need to find candidates like [bland] Parent A, who give us no reason to say no, rather than Parent B, who present a complex set of features, some attractive…
dmunger | November 7, 2006Take a look at this video of a professional drummer playing the conga:
It's easy to see that the sound coming from the drum is perfectly synchronized with the motion of the drummer's hands. Or is it? When a sound enters your ear, it takes less than 1 millisecond for the signal to be transported from the outer to the inner ear, where it can be perceived by the brain. The equivalent process in the eye takes 50 milliseconds. Then there is the matter of the physical difference in the speed of light versus sound. If the drummer is between 15 and 20 meters away, the faster travel of the light…
dmunger | November 6, 2006If I get a phone call from a solicitor asking me to support my local fire department or the search for the cure for cancer, I refuse to give. If a live person shows up at my door asking me to donate to a worthy cause, I nearly always give something. Am I behaving irrationally? Surely seeking donations via the telephone is more efficient than traipsing door-to-door. Shouldn't I support the charities that are most efficient?
Tim Harford of Slate argues that such behavior on my part demonstrates that my charitable giving isn't truly altruistic. Indeed, the most altruistic donor would realize…
dmunger | November 3, 2006Just about two weeks ago, I posted this visual illusion (if you haven't seen it yet, make sure to watch it with the sound turned ON):
How many flashes do you see?
In fact the dot only flashes once, but according to the study I report on in the post, the two beeps are supposed to throw you off. If you are like Shams et al's participants, you would most likely see two flashes, not one. In fact, just 23 percent of CogDaily readers reported seeing two flashes.
Much speculation ensued in the comments, but I had a couple ideas of my own, so last Friday I developed a quick study to test two…
dmunger | November 3, 2006Although alcohol consumption plays a role in about 31 percent of homicides, only 1.4 percent of TV news reports on murders mention alcohol. Only 12.8 percent of TV news stories on traffic accidents mention alcohol, while 34 percent of accidents involve drunk drivers. I've often wondered why people who've consumed many drinks still drive at high speeds, where at best they're likely to get caught for drunk driving, and perhaps this is part of the reason.
An Ohio State press release describes the study, conducted by Michael Slater, Marilee Long, and Valerie Ford:
They used statistics from the…
dmunger | November 2, 2006Conventional wisdom has it that giving young children chocolate will cause them to become fidgety. This belief is so pervasive that many parents won't give their kids candy within several hours of bedtime, convinced their children won't be able to sleep. After Halloween, many parents ration their kids' candy consumption, again based at least partly on the belief that too much candy will cause kids to go bonkers.
But when Michelle Ingram and Ronald Rapee became interested in the phenomenon, they were surprised to find that in fact very little research has been done on the effect of chocolate…
dmunger | November 2, 2006When you're out of work, or you're so poor that you don't have enough money for basic necessities of life, one of the most devastating effects isn't so much physical discomfort, it's mental anguish. If you're not getting enough to eat, or don't have a place to sleep, you can still survive for weeks, even years, but the mental strain of poverty can eat away at the remaining shreds of dignity.
That's why identifying the particular traits that lead to or alleviate the debilitating mental problems stemming from poverty is so important. BPS Research Digest discusses a recent study led by Johnny…
dmunger | November 1, 2006As I was scanning the internet this morning for news articles and blog posts to comment on, I came up with four good candidates. I spent the next 30 minutes trying to decide whether to write a post discussing a single article (like this), or just write a sentence or two about each post, with links to all of them (like this).
It occurred to me that I actually have no idea which type of news post CogDaily readers would prefer to see. So, in typical Cognitive Daily fashion, I decided to make a poll.
One point about the last poll option: the research reports require significantly more effort, so…
dmunger | October 31, 2006
Any grown-up would be surprised to see SpongeBob Squarepants show up in a Batman movie. Clearly, these characters inhabit two different fantasy worlds: one lives in a fabulous mansion near bustling Gotham City, while the other inhabits an underwater pineapple. Grown-ups divide fantasy worlds into non-intersecting sets: If Batman has even heard of SpongeBob, he would believe him to be a fictional character.
But what about children? Do they have the same understanding of the distinction between separate fictional worlds? Kids do understand the difference between reality and make-believe…
dmunger | October 30, 2006Face recognition is a task which humans do with little effort, even though in fact it's a tremendously difficult problem. To recognize a face, we need to be able to ignore traits that change over time, while focusing in on details that remain constant. A simple computer program, for example, would have difficulty recognizing that Jim frowning (before his fries arrive) is the same person as Jim smiling (after his fries arrive).
The fact that we have little difficulty recognizing our friends and family regardless of their facial expressions has led researchers to speculate that recognizing…
dmunger | October 30, 2006Yesterday I spent a delightful several hours having lunch with Chris Mooney (of Seed, Scienceblogs, and war on science fame) and attending his talk in Durham, NC. I also got to meet fellow ScienceBloggers Abel Pharmboy and Coturnix.
At lunch, the conversation centered on a favorite topic here at ScienceBlogs, Science Journalism. Chris made what I felt was a very cogent point which explains the Greg Easterbrook phenomenon: from the perspective of the top magazines, good science journalism is journalism that makes a controversial point. Easterbrook provides controversy, so he keeps getting…
dmunger | October 27, 2006On Monday, I posted a recently-discovered visual illusion with a quick poll to see how many of our readers could spot the illusion. As it turned out, not very many of them did. This was surprising to me, because the team that discovered the illusion, led by Ladan Shams, found that the illusion was very robust, experienced nearly all the time by most viewers. So why didn't our readers see it?
I've designed a quick study to test a couple of hypotheses. Normally we restrict Casual Fridays to just 5 questions, but this time I had to stretch the rules just a bit -- you'll have 11 quick questions.…
dmunger | October 26, 2006The New York Times has an article on the most recent stereotype threat research: Women perform worse on math tests when they are first told that men are better at math. When they are told that men and women are equal, they perform equally. Unfortunately, the report in Science on which the article is based is locked behind a paywall. Fortunately, you can find some of Heine's research materials, including the essays used to remind women of stereotype threat here.
Also, Cognitive Daily has reported on similar research:
Learning about stereotypes reduces their threat
The negative impact of…