dmunger | June 1, 2006Several studies indicate that the brain regions responsible for taste overlap the areas responsible for detecting pain.
However, Dana Small and A. Vania Apkarian noted that little research has been conducted on the relationship to taste sensitivity and pain. They developed a simple experiment to see if there was a relationship.
Eleven volunteers with chronic back pain were matched with 11 normal volunteers, of similar age, gender, and education backgrounds. Each person was tested separately for sensitivity to four different kinds of tastes: bitter, salty, sweet, and sour. They each sampled a…
dmunger | June 1, 2006Cog News has an article about new research on the incidence of face blindness.
"Until a few years ago, only 100 cases of prosopagnosia had been documented worldwide, but it now appears the condition is much less rare than had previously been assumed," says Nakayama, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Testing of 1,600 individuals found that 2 percent of the general public may have face-blindness and a German group has recently made a similar estimate. It's conceivable that millions of people may have symptoms consistent with prosopagnosia,…
dmunger | May 31, 2006Courtney Martin makes an interesting argument about the phenomenon she calls The Paradox of the Perfect Girl. It's the result of the recent upsurge of girls outperforming boys academically:
The perfect girl is everywhere. She is your niece, your daughter, your friend's genius kid. She is the girl who makes the valedictorian speech at your son's graduation and the type-A class president in the skimpy black dress that he brings to the prom. The perfect girl is thin and hungry, not for food, but for honors, awards, scholarships, recognition. The Princeton Review book is the perfect girl's bible…
dmunger | May 31, 2006Roy Behrens has created a fascinating site analyzing the relationship between Gestalt psychology, cubism, and camoflage used on ships in World War I.
In recent years, it has been verified that prominent French camoufleurs during World War I were consciously, willingly influenced by cubist methods ("In order to completely dissimulate things," wrote French artist Lucien Victor Guirand de Scevola, who commanded the first camouflage unit, "I used the same methods the cubists had used to simulate objects" (Kahn 1984, 19).) But the same cannot be said of Gestalt theory and cubism. As Heider…
dmunger | May 30, 2006According to an article in the New York Times, names of companies that are easier to pronounce lead to higher stock prices.
The researchers ... tested name complexity and the performance of real initial public offerings listed on the New York and American Stock Exchanges. A $1,000 investment in a group of stocks with easy names yielded $112 more in profit than the same investment in a group with difficult names. But the effect began to disappear over time.
The researchers argue that names that are "easier to process" are valued more by purchasers.
dmunger | May 30, 2006A recent study about violence and sex in TV advertising got a fair amount of press. "Violence and sex don't sell," the headlines proclaimed. If such a claim is true, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the blusterings of ad agencies worldwide.
Advertisers have always used the idea that "sex sells" to generate interest in their products, and television networks have argued that they need to offer lots of violence and sex in their programming in order to attract viewers. But what if sex and violence don't really sell products? Doesn't that turn the whole notion of "sex sells" on its…
dmunger | May 30, 2006When he was a toddler, our son Jim was entranced by Barney the Dinosaur. He'd watch the program for an uninterrupted 30 minutes each day, giving exhausted parents a much-needed chance for a rest, while Jimmy learned important skills such as counting and letters. While the rest was welcome, our belief that the programming was educational might have been misguided. An article in BPS Psychology Digest has the details. Apparently two-year-olds just don't pay attention to instructions transmitted via the TV:
In an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds told face-to-face…
dmunger | May 29, 2006This week's "Ask a Scienceblogger question" is:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
NO!
The public isn't qualified to determine whether research is worthwhile. Why do you think researchers spend nine-plus years studying their specialties?
However...
I do think that research paid for by public money should be freely available to the public. That means that the journal publishing industry would have to be turned upside down. Today subscribing to a…
dmunger | May 29, 2006Interesting article in the Washington Post about video game addiction in South Korea (via Slashdot). From the article:
An estimated 2.4 percent of the population from 9 to 39 are believed to be suffering from game addiction, according to a government-funded survey. Another 10.2 percent were found to be "borderline cases" at risk of addiction -- defined as an obsession with playing electronic games to the point of sleep deprivation, disruption of daily life and a loosening grip on reality. Such feelings are typically coupled with depression and a sense of withdrawal when not playing,…
dmunger | May 26, 2006Take a look at the following movie. Your job is to identify which ball appeared to make the noise in the final frame. (click to play):
If this seems confusing now, it should be cleared up by the end of this post. You can register your result in this poll:
Synesthesia, as we've discussed before, is a rare condition. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode. It's a remarkable ability, manifesting itself in a variety of different ways -- seeing "auras" around friends, or associating a sound or even…
dmunger | May 26, 2006Chris Chatham has an excellent summary of a talk by University of Chicago neurologist / mathematician Jack Cowan, who has come up with a mathematical explanation of a variety of common hallucinations.
The development of orientation and spatial frequency maps in V1 [a region of the brain which maps images as they are transmitted from the eyes] can be simulated with some fairly "simple" (maybe simple to Jack Cowan, but not to me!) self-organizing functions, such that "orientation and spatial frequency are the zeroth and first order spherical harmonics" and "the coefficient of the first order…
dmunger | May 25, 2006Japanese researchers have found a way to use a human brain image to control a robot.
While this isn't exactly "mind control" -- the human still has to physically move his body in order to create the proper brain image, it's a fascinating example of how things might work in the future. There are still quite a few obstacles to overcome, however. An MRI machine is a huge device, and it must be operated in a clean room away from sources of magnetic interference. It's not like you could use this thing to drive your car.
Also, the headline on the news story is misleading: "Brain waves" are not…
dmunger | May 24, 2006We've discussed implicit attitudes on Cognitive Daily before, but never in the context of food. The standard implicit attitude task asks you to identify items belonging to two different categories. Consider the following lists. Use your mouse to click on items which are either pleasant or related to Genetically Modified foods (GM foods). (Clicking won't actually do anything, it's just a way of self-monitoring your progress)
Horrible
Good
Transgenic
Nasty
Crops
Wonderful
dislike
GE livestock
Now with this next list, do the same task, only click on items which are either unpleasant or related…
dmunger | May 22, 2006We've had plenty of discussion of the Stroop Effect on Cognitive Daily, and a cool effect it is -- but it's not the only effect with a catchy name. How about the spatial numerical association of response codes effect? Not catchy enough for you? The scholars researching the effect have taken to calling it the SNARC Effect. Now if that isn't an effect named to win a blogger's heart, I don't know what is.
First identified by Dehaene, Bossini, and Giraux in 1993, the SNARC Effect suggests that people represent numbers in the form of an imaginary number line. When asked to indicate if a digit is…
dmunger | May 19, 2006The Stroop Effect was originally just a language effect: we're slower identifying the color text is printed in when the words themselves name different colors. In the 81 years since the effect was first observed, it's been applied to a variety of very different phenomena. In general, the effect is explained by automatic processing: when a process is automatic, it conflicts with the desired goal and so slows processing. In fact, the Stroop Effect is so robust that researchers now use it to determine if a process is indeed automatic.
Much research has focused on the issue of whether racial…
dmunger | May 18, 2006Take a look at this photo:
What emotion would you say I'm expressing here? Let's make this one a poll (make sure you answer before you read any farther):
In 1872, Charles Darwin argued that facial expressions must have evolved just as surely as eyes or noses (you can read an excerpt from his work on emotional expressions in Greta's book The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions). Later research has shown that there are several universally understood facial expressions, and that these expressions can be defined and described specifically so that anyone can imitate them and make their…
dmunger | May 18, 2006My article The Economics of Conservation is up on seedmagazine.com. The article discusses the clash over global warming, and how economists and climatologists deal with the uncertainty inherent in each of their disciplines. It was an interesting article to write -- I got to talk with a number of economists and a climatologist, and I learned a lot about how these disciplines work.
Since you can't make comments directly on Seed articles, feel free to use this post for discussion.
dmunger | May 17, 2006This week's Ask a Scienceblogger question is "will the "human" race still be around in 100 years?"
The short answer is yes.
The slightly longer answer is this: we could face a number of catastrophes, including a pandemic, massive global warming, nuclear war, or all of the above. Our numbers could be reduced to a tiny fraction of what they are today. But we will most certainly still exist.
From a cognitive science perspective, there are a couple other interesting possibilities. What if, within the next 100 years, we succeeded in creating artificial intelligence that appeared to match human…
dmunger | May 16, 2006The text below will bring up an animation. Just look at it once -- no cheating! A picture will flash for about a quarter of a second, followed by a color pattern for a quarter second. Then the screen will go blank for about one second, and four objects will appear. Use the poll below to indicate which object (#1, 2, 3, or 4) appeared in the picture.
Click here to view the animation!
I'll let you know which answer was correct at the end of the post, but this test approximates the procedure of an experiment conducted by Kristine Liu and Yuhong Jiang, designed to measure the capacity of visual…
dmunger | May 15, 2006Every so often on Cognitive Daily, someone will post a comment asking for help on a paper they're writing for school. It's pretty clear where these people come from: they've done a Google search on video games or whatever it is that interests them, and our post is the first thing they've found that seems like it might be remotely relevant to the topic. Often, I'm not especially happy to answer the question they've asked, because usually it's not a very good question.
Examples of bad questions are:
Questions that are readily answered by simply reading the post where the commenter has posted…