dmunger | May 12, 2006Some site news:
Now that summer is upon us, Casual Fridays is going to take a little hiatus. Don't worry, it will be back next fall, but it's pretty much impossible for us to keep Casual Fridays going in the summer since we'll be traveling quite a bit. We can schedule regular posts in advance, but Casual Fridays require us to respond in real-time.
Also, over the next few days, I anticipate doing a little design work on the site. If things don't look or work quite right, please let me know in a comment on this post, or you could also e-mail me using the "Contact" link above.
Update: A…
dmunger | May 12, 2006When our son Jim "graduated" from preschool, there was a very formal ceremony, complete with little caps and gowns. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), we had already planned a trip to Disneyworld for the same dates. Forced to choose between Disney and sitting through a scholarly ritual, for some reason little Jim chose the former. He didn't face a similar choice at the end of elementary school -- we all dutifully attended -- and the whole family will also attend his graduation from middle school at the end of the month.
I attended preschool as a child, but I don't…
dmunger | May 10, 2006Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings.
I've attempted to reproduce the type of display…
dmunger | May 9, 2006The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you can:
If English is your native language, you should be much quicker at naming the colors of the first list than the second list. Why? Even though the task is to identify the colors, proficient readers can't stop themselves from reading the words, which slows color identification in cases where…
dmunger | May 9, 2006All the ScienceBloggers have been asked to write about the recent invention they could wipe off the face of the earth. Their answers have been the usual suspects: nuclear bombs, land mines -- truly awful stuff -- and they might be right.
However, I'm not enough of a historian to know what the full impact of nuclear weapons has been. Maybe if the Bomb hadn't been invented, we would have had a World War III by now. Therefore, I've decided to nominate the Ab Lounge. True, it hasn't caused any wars, but imagine what watching your favorite TV show would be like if you weren't incessantly tormented…
dmunger | May 5, 2006Every year it seems there are more and more graduation ceremonies to attend. Not just high school and college, but middle school, and even elementary and pre-school ceremonies.
All this has made us wonder. Which of these ceremonies is really worth attending? Now we all have a chance to find out, because that's what we'll ask you in this week's Casual Fridays study.
Click here to participate.
As usual, the survey is brief -- just 5 questions, which should only take a minute of your time (we're cheating a bit this week, with three multi-part questions). You have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time…
dmunger | May 5, 2006Last week, we asked Cognitive Daily readers to tell us what they believed was an acceptable excuse for two very different social gaffes. Here's the first scenario:
Suppose a co-worker insulted you during a meeting which involved your boss and several colleagues. The insult was audible to all, and caused you grave embarrassment.
And here's the second:
Suppose a friend calls you 15 minutes before to cancel a lunch meeting that had been planned for several days.
In each case, we provided the same eight excuses, and asked readers to tell us which were acceptable. We also asked readers to answer a…
dmunger | May 4, 2006Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel's hosting a discussion on who should be on a hypothetical Mount Rushmore of science. There's a fairly broad consensus that Darwin, Einstein, and Newton make the cut, but rather heated debate on who should be the fourth member.
Many of Chad's readers suggest Sigmund Freud. I found that surprising, since the field of psychology has largely moved away from the work of Freud. Freud is still very influential in literary and cultural studies, but not so much in the world of science. Indeed, one of Freud's lasting influences was the attempt to undertake a…
dmunger | May 3, 2006Americans, as any ScienceBlogger will tell you, have a woefully poor understanding of math and science. For the most part, even the most ignorant among us are able to stumble through life, but what happens when we're confronted with a genuine scientific question with a real impact on our lives?
Consider the typical doctor's office scenario: the doctor asks a breast cancer patient to decide on a treatment. "There's a 30 percent chance of recurrence in five years," she tells the patient, "but with chemotherapy, the chance is reduced to 10 percent." If the patient doesn't have a basic…
dmunger | May 1, 2006Family lore has it that my uncle was influential in instituting what is now a fixture in college education: student evaluation of college instructors. He was class president at the University of Washington in the 1960s, when tensions between students and the school administrators were high, and he suggested implementing one of the first student course evaluation systems in the nation as a way to address the problem. Needless to say, the idea caught on.
While college faculty complain unceasingly about the fairness of the now nearly universal student course evaluation system (I did it myself,…
dmunger | April 28, 2006When we are wronged, we expect the wrongdoer to apologize. But some apologies just don't seem to cut the muster. As a teacher, my least favorite excuse was always this one: "Can I have an extension on the assignment? I've got a really important assignment due in _______ class." If the other class is so important, what does that make my class -- chopped liver?
But clearly sometimes students -- and others -- do have acceptable excuses for their transgressions. Where do we draw the line? Today's Casual Fridays survey hopes to find out.
Click here to participate
As usual, the survey is brief --…
dmunger | April 28, 2006Last week's study generated plenty of interest: it was the fastest we've ever gotten 400 responses. The study was based on a claim by this web site that they could influence your thoughts with 98 percent accuracy using a simple math quiz. If you haven't tried it yet, unfortunately I'm going to spoil it for you right now: you're supposed to think of a red hammer.
We wanted to answer a few questions about the claim. First, 98 percent? Really? Having done a survey or two, I'd be impressed with a survey that could predict 98 percent of the responses to "what is 2 + 2?"
Second, to the extent that…
dmunger | April 28, 2006The transfer of archives from the old Cognitive Daily site is now complete; all of our archives are now available here at ScienceBlogs! There really are some amazing articles back there. Here are some of my favorites from CogDaily's adolescent months:
Can our understanding of "Normal" and "Beautiful" be distorted?
A boy and his dog
False confessions: Not as rare as you think
Do women perceive color differently from men?
Can we compensate for the distraction of driving with a cell phone?
The Mozart Effect: Is it really all about attitude?
Is the mind like a computer? Evidence that it is not…
dmunger | April 27, 2006I've now finished posting archives up through June of 2005. There's some great stuff in there -- here are some highlights:
Drumbeats alone can convey emotion
Is memory better for shocking events?
Why we can't all be divas
What makes a wine expert?
Kids' unreliability as witnesses: Hard wired into the brain?
Why some of us choke under pressure
Who believes in magic?
Who still believes in magic?
Music and IQ
Why do we forget our childhood?
When do we learn what colors mean?
Does racial diversity help students learn?
There's lots more great stuff that I skipped over, so give yourself a treat and…
dmunger | April 26, 2006When two athletes are the same size and strength, what makes one better than the other? In many sports, the best athletes are the ones who can react more quickly to game situations than others. Are they just generally better at focusing their attention where it needs to be? Or have they learned some skill set specific to the game at hand?
Attention researchers have made some efforts to learn if athletes perform better in visual tasks than non-athletes, but the results have been mixed. In some experiments, athletes react faster than non-athletes, but in others, there is no discernible…
dmunger | April 26, 2006Over the next few days I'll be dusting off the old Cognitive Daily posts and moving them over to this site. If you'll scroll down a bit to the archives section on the sidebar to the left, you'll notice that they now extend all the way back to our first post back in January of 2005. I've even imported most of the comments (I did take the liberty of deleting over 300 pieces of spam). Of course, there's a bit of a gap between March of 2005 and January of 2006, but that will be fixed soon enough. In the meantime, here is some great reading from the early days of Cognitive Daily:
Troxler -- and…
dmunger | April 25, 2006A number of studies have found cultural differences in visual cognition. For example, Takahiko Masuda and Richard Nisbett found that when Americans watch a short video clip of an underwater scene, they tend to recall the items in the foreground: the fish. Japanese people watching the same clip recall the items in the background: rocks, plants, and their relationship to one another.
A team led by Shinobu Kitayama showed people a frame with a line drawn inside. When asked to duplicate the line in a different-sized frame, Americans were better at drawing it the same size, despite the frame,…
dmunger | April 21, 2006Cognitive Daily reader "Jokermage" pointed us to a web site which claimed that it could predict with 98 percent accuracy what site visitors would be thinking after a short quiz.
I tried the quiz, and indeed, the site appeared to "predict" my thoughts. But could it really do this with 98 percent accuracy? We've decided to see if we can replicate the process here. I've created two different quizzes, one which exactly replicates the original quiz, and another which is slightly different. So that we can divide participants into two roughly even groups, click on the appropriate link below:
Click…
dmunger | April 21, 2006Last week, we asked our readers a few questions about procrastination: how long it takes them to wake up on a typical morning, how close to the deadline they finish computing their taxes, and so on.
The basic question was, are there different types of procrastinators, or if you put off one type of activity, are you more likely to put off another? The results suggest there is some truth to both notions. Let's first look at the evidence that procrastination in one realm is associated procrastination in another. This chart compares sleep habits with tax preparation habits:
It does indeed…
dmunger | April 20, 2006If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there have been comparatively few…