dmunger | October 25, 2006Everyone knows the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Bound by that axiom, magazines, newspapers, and most of all, TV, bombard us with pictures every day. The latest hot internet properties aren't text-based sites like Google but picture-based sites like Flickr and YouTube. Psychological research backs this up: we do remember pictures more readily than we remember words.
The next question, of course, is "why?" Recent research by Paul W. Foos and Paula Goolkasian is beginning to shed light on the difference between memory for pictures and words. They had previously found that while…
dmunger | October 25, 2006The Social Science Statistics blog (new to me, but it's been around for a while) has a good writeup of a 2002 study by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch which systematically examines the effectiveness of deadlines in preventing procrastination:
They randomized participants into three categories: three evenly-spaced deadlines every 7 days; an end-deadline after 21 days; or a self-imposed schedule of deadlines within a three week period.
Which one would you select if you could? Maybe the end-deadline because it gives you the most flexibility in arranging the work (similar to a final exam or…
dmunger | October 24, 2006This week's "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question is easy: The best science TV show is Mythbusters.
Let's face it: most TV science programming is downright awful. It dumbs down the content, and tends not to explain the really interesting part of the question at hand. As I wrote recently over on Word Munger,
Whether it's Nova or the National Geographic Channel, every documentary I've watched recently seems to follow the same pattern.
1. Introduce "mysterious" or "controversial" element
2. Bring in a tiny bit of factually relevant material
3. Interview a sexy or "culturally diverse" expert. There are…
dmunger | October 24, 2006There was plenty of interest in yesterday's audio-visual illusion. In case you missed it, I'll post it again here:
Play the movie with the sound turned up. If the illusion works, then you'll see a dot flash twice, accompanied by two beeps. But actually the dot only flashes once. Unfortunately, we've had a hard time getting viewers to see the illusion (as of this writing, just over a quarter of those viewing the video claim to see two or more flashes). I have a couple ideas about why people don't seem to see it reliably here on Cognitive Daily, and I'm going to investigate them further on…
dmunger | October 23, 2006There's nothing cooler for a perception researcher (or writer) than a new visual illusion. When I learned about this one, I spent half the day Thursday trying to recreate it, but I couldn't get it to work. Finally, in five minutes on Friday morning, I think I figured it out. (Update: Actually, as it turned out, I didn't figure it out at all. In the meantime, Chris from Mixing Memory pointed me to Shams' web page with much better demos. So let's try this again, using one of Shams' demos.) Play the movie and watch for a dot flashing in the middle of the screen. Make sure you've got the sound…
dmunger | October 23, 2006
Winners of mid-sized lottery prizes are happier than losers -- or those winning small prizes -- even over the long term.
Chris Chatham reviews a review of the research on Theory of Mind, the science of understanding how people understand the minds of others.
Tom Keane argues that bridges should not be made suicide proof, as this will only shift the problem elsewhere while ruining the beauty of bridges.
John Grohol argues that bridges should have suicide barriers, because they can save lives.
For more great posts, visit Encephalon 9, a roundup of the best neuroscience posts over the last two…
dmunger | October 22, 2006If the human eye was a digital camera, how many megapixels would it have?
Clarkvision does the calculations.
The answer: 576 megapixels.
Impressive job -- I wish I had thought to do that. Note that their calculations require a bit of fudging: the fovea actually covers just a tiny bit of the visual field; the eye must move from point to point in order to assemble an image this detailed. A digital camera records all the pixels at the same time. For the photographically inclined, the article also goes on to make several other camera/eye calculations.
A separate question: could a 576 megapixel…
dmunger | October 20, 2006Last week's Casual Friday study was inspired by a recently-discovered illusion which showed that sound could influence what people percieve visually. I was planning to report on the study confirming that illusion yesterday, but my computer wasn't cooperating with me, and I couldn't generate a demo of the illusion. I think I've figured it out now, but now it's Casual Friday, so you'll have to wait until Monday to see it.
In the meantime, we've created our own study of visual illusion and sound. What we wanted to know is if sound could push a viewer over the threshold from not perceiving an…
dmunger | October 19, 2006The idea of a distinct "internet addiction" problem separate from, say, compulsive gambling or obsession with pornography isn't especially new. It's been studied since at least 1999, and we reported on one attempt to describe it in 2004.
Yet in the U.S., there has been no serious effort to quantify it until now. A new study of over 2,500 adults has found some dramatic results:
13.7 percent (more than one out of eight respondents) found it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time
12.4 percent stayed online longer than intended very often or often
12.3 percent had seen a…
dmunger | October 18, 2006This week's Ask a Scienceblogger: "Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you?"
I'd say that's nearly impossible to answer: there are too many other factors at work. But consider this:
Kuwait's average life expectancy is 76.9
Portugal's is 77.2
Since Kuwait is a primarily Muslim country and Portugal is primarily Christian, it appears observing Ramadan doesn't have much of an effect on life expectancy. The two countries are similar economically, with both countries registering nearly equal GDP per capita ($18,047 for Kuwait versus $18,126…
dmunger | October 18, 2006Apropos of our discussion yesterday of the pros and cons of open access publishing, I'd like to point you to a great resource: the Directory of Open Access Journals.
The Directory of Open Access Journals ... covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2417 journals in the directory. Currently 709 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 118146 articles are included in the DOAJ service.
The psychology section lists 56 journals, though some of our favorite open access journals such as the…
dmunger | October 17, 2006Click on the "Video Games / Technology" category over to the left and you'll see that we've covered many, many studies on the subject of video game violence, almost all of them demonstrating a link between playing violent games and real-world aggressive behavior. Nearly every time we do, we receive an influx of comments from gamers claiming that video games don't make them more aggressive. Quite the contrary, they argue, the games help them wind down, releasing pent-up anger harmlessly in a virtual world rather than causing real harm.
Offering counterexamples (such as the fact that games…
dmunger | October 17, 2006Jake Young has written an excellent summary of a panel discussion he attended at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, as it presents a fascinating interplay of the forces at work in academic publishing. But if Jake's synopsis is too much for you, here's a quick summary of the issues involved:
The current "market-based" scholarly publishing system is primarily paid for by governments: Researchers and libraries get grants, and the grants pay for subscriptions to journals.
This system limits access: not everyone has access to libraries, and not all…
dmunger | October 16, 2006The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget developed several tasks to show how very young children were different from older kids. One of the most surprising is the "conservation" task: a 5-year-old, who talks clearly and appears quite bright, will watch water being poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, slender one. She will say that the tall glass has "more" water. A 7-year-old won't make the same mistake.
Surely, then, adults are aware that short, fat glasses have deceptively large volumes, right? Not according to a recent article in BMJ. Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum asked…
dmunger | October 16, 2006The BPS Research Digest is reporting on a new article by Satoshi Kanozawa, who claims that the poor economic conditions and short life expectancy in many developing countries can be explained by low IQ.
The economic historian Richard Wilkinson has argued that economic inequality leads to shorter life expectancy because being at the bottom of the social pile puts people under prolonged stress. But Kanazawa rejects this hypothesis. He argues his data show that once population IQ is taken into account, a country's average life expectancy is no longer related to economic development and…
dmunger | October 13, 2006Today's Casual Fridays study involves visual illusions. We're exploring when and how you see illusions. You'll need QuickTime and a computer with the volume turned up to participate. These illusions are great fun, and we're excited to see if there are any differences in how they are perceived. We really can't tell you much more without spoiling the results, so why not just try it?
Click here to participate.
As usual, the study is brief -- just 4 questions, which should only take a minute of your time. You have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, October 18 to participate -- or until…
dmunger | October 12, 2006Yahoo! reports on a new study sponsored by Apple to help sell 30-inch monitors:
The study, which evaluated Apple's 30-inch Apple Cinema Display, concluded that large screens can offer gains of up to 50 percent to 65 percent in productivity on a variety of specific office tasks and can earn back their extra costs in time savings over several years. The 30-in. display costs $1,999.
So if all you do all day is copy spreadsheet data from one window to another, a shiny new monitor could help you do your job a whole lot faster. On the other hand, if that's the entire substance of your job, you're…
dmunger | October 12, 2006Since I mentioned here that I took a backpacking trip to the Great Smoky Mountains last weekend, I might also mention that I'm writing a tongue-and-cheek description of the trip, with some pretty good photos, over at Word Munger. The first installment is up now. (Language may be NSFW)
dmunger | October 11, 2006Cognitive Daily would not exist without chocolate. Every week, I buy a bag of chocolate covered raisins, and I portion them out precisely each day so that I've finished them by all by (casual) Friday. I try to time my consumption to coincide with the most difficult part of the job: reporting on peer-reviewed journal articles. The little news items, Ask a ScienceBlogger responses, and other miscellaneous announcements can be completed unassisted by chocolate, but then there wouldn't be much reason to visit the site. Sometimes even the chocolate raisins aren't enough, and I head for the nearest…
dmunger | October 11, 2006Janet Stemwedel and Chad Orzel have each written excellent posts on the necessity of improving science journalism. Janet argues that what's needed is to improve science education:
If there were an actual clamor for science reporting that was detailed, informative, and grounded in fact -- a clamor not just from scientists but from the people, speaking in large numbers -- then news organizations would have no choice but to provide it, lest they lose their audience (and ad revenue) to someone who would. Right?
Right! Of course we need a more educated public. Then journalists would be forced to…