dmunger | April 19, 2006The average 3- to 10-year-old girl in the U.S. owns eight Barbies. Only one percent of this group owns no Barbies. And every girl seems to go through similar stages with her Barbies -- first, adoration, next, ambivalence, and finally, rejection. By the time they're in middle school, most girls have either thrown out their Barbies or cut off their hair and amputated multiple limbs. These aren't just casual observations -- a 2004 study observed that while young girls identify with Barbie, 10- to 14-year-olds have distanced themselves from Barbie.
But what of the recent media hype suggesting…
dmunger | April 18, 2006Take a look at these two faces.
One of these women can't recognize that the other is afraid, but when asked to express fear, is still able to produce a fearful expression. Can you tell which is which?
We know the amygdala is associated with identifying scary music; we know the amygdala helps us generate a fear response, but what about producing a fear response?
S.P. are the initials of a 54-year-old woman who had surgery to remove her right amygdala to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy. During the surgery, it was found that her left amygdala was damaged as well, and so she effectively lost…
dmunger | April 14, 2006When I was in college, I put off everything until the last possible instant: I got out of bed just moments before class started; I finished papers minutes before they were due. But I rarely actually missed a deadline for a paper. Now most of my deadlines aren't nearly as firm as they were in college -- if I really need more time to complete a project, I can usually reason with my client and get more time.
Just one deadline seems set in stone: the April 15 Income Tax deadline (though this year it's actually April 17, since the 15th is a weekend day). In fact, you can actually file for an…
dmunger | April 14, 2006Last week's Casual Friday study seemed like a great idea. Playing off the study we recently analyzed which revealed that the orientation of shapes could convey emotion, we thought we might be able to demonstrate a similar phenomenon with scenes.
Respondents were divided into three groups. Everyone saw the same three pictures, but each group saw them with a different amount of slant:
The first group saw the original, unaltered photos. The second group's photos were all slanted by 7 degrees. The third group's photos were slanted by 20 degrees. Each viewer rated each photo on a scale of 1 to…
dmunger | April 13, 2006If you have normal hearing and an amygdala, you can probably tell which of these two songs is "happy," and which is "scary."
Song 1
Song 2
However, for extreme cases of epilepsy, one treatment is to surgically remove the amygdala, the area of the brain which processes, among other things, the sensation of fear. People who have had this surgery fail to recognize fearful facial expressions. A 1978 study in which experimenters stimulated patients' amygdalas directly with electrodes caused them to behave as if they were afraid.
But other efforts to induce fear reactions in patients whose…
dmunger | April 11, 2006Yesterday's post brings up an interesting question: How can you be unaware of having even seen an image, and yet be able to make reliable judgments about that image? That article is just one example of a variety of situations in which people can be unaware of seeing something, even immediately after being given a quick glimpse of it, yet behave as if they have seen it.
We discussed how visual images can be "masked" -- flashed quickly and then followed by another image which is displayed for a longer period. Though observers had no conscious recollection of seeing faces, they still could make…
dmunger | April 10, 2006How long does it take to decide if someone's attractive? It might be before you even know you looked.
Researchers can use a masking technique to show an image of a human face subliminally -- without the observer being aware of seeing it. To do it, they first show a scrambled face (39 milliseconds). Next, the face itself (13 milliseconds), a blank screen (13 milliseconds), and a cartoon face (39 milliseconds). I've tried to duplicate the technique using an animated GIF file, but I think it's beyond the capability of an ordinary web browser.
Click here to see it
Did you see a human face? I had…
dmunger | April 7, 2006Do pictures evoke similar emotions for you as they do for others? Now's your chance to find out. This week's Casual Fridays study is designed to determine whether the same pictures evoke the same emotions in different people. You'll first be asked your birth month, which is just a way to divide participants into roughly equal sized groups. Then you'll be asked to rate pictures on emotional scales. Come back next Friday to see the results!
Click here to participate.
As usual, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, April 11, to participate (or until there are 400 responses, 150 more than…
dmunger | April 7, 2006This week's Casual Friday study was about the hearing loss problem associated with headphone use, and whether readers would adopt a technological solution to the problem. Eighty-one percent of our 133 respondents said that they own a portable music device (though the relatively low response rate suggests that perhaps some people who don't own such devices chose not to respond to the study) (from here on out, I'm going to refer to these devices as iPods, even though not everyone who has a portable music device has an iPod -- remember, it's casual!). Forty-nine percent of our respondents said…
dmunger | April 6, 2006Standup comics have long made vice president Dick Cheney the butt of their jokes, suggesting that he's never seen in public with the President because he inhabits some fortified underground bunker so as to avoid terrorists or some other unidentified threat, or that he's actually a cyborg, secretly controlling the government from his dark, hidden lair. But recent research in visual attention suggests that there might be another reason Cheney wouldn't want to be seen near the President. It may be that by standing next to a more famous person, your own appeal is diminished.
I'm actually only…
dmunger | April 3, 2006Babies as young as three months old will follow the eyes of an adult to look at the same thing the adult is looking at. This behavior makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: if a predator or other danger looms, we can learn from the actions of others (though it's unclear exactly what a three-month old would do to escape a ravenous bear).
But if the gaze-following behavior is really a survival adaptation, wouldn't we be more likely to follow someone's gaze if they also had a fearful facial expression? After all, if someone's glancing to the side with a cheerful smile, we don't expect…
dmunger | March 31, 2006With legendary guitarist Pete Townshend's recent public statement that studio headphones have caused deafness, there's growing concern that iPods and other portable music devices might be destroying the ears of the children of the digital era.
We thought this might be a good time to find out how significant an issue this is to our readers, and how they're dealing with the problem. Would you make use of a technological solution?
Click here to participate.
As usual, you'll have until 11:59 Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday, April 5 to respond -- or until we have 250 responses, whichever comes…
dmunger | March 31, 2006Last week we asked readers to answer some questions about how they managed their email. The results are in, and boy are they ... confusing. We're having trouble identifying any clear patterns at all in email management. First of all, let's get a sense of the scale of the problem. Here's how respondents' email use broke down:
Most respondents send and receive between 11 and 50 emails a day, and the vast majority -- 84 percent of respondents -- have non-spam email traffic of less than 50 per day. One respondent of the 251 who answered actually claims to send and receive over 1000 emails a day…
dmunger | March 30, 2006The TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a bit of a guilty pleasure for our family. I've never been quite sure why we like it: the plot of the show is always the same. We're introduced to a family which has undergone some terrible tragedy through no fault of their own: the father has been blinded by the gunshot of a thief while he was working overtime at a convenience store, or the daughter is undergoing treatment for chemotherapy, or the grandmother has adopted six troubled teenagers. Despite (and sometimes because of) their best efforts, the family's home has fallen into extreme…
dmunger | March 29, 2006Take a look at the QuickTime movie below. It will show a still image for 10 seconds, then a blank screen. Then it will show you the image again. Your job is to look for a detail that has been changed between the two images.
Most people have difficulty with this task. Even when the part that changes is central to the image, accuracy is typically no better than 50 percent. For the particular type of change depicted in this movie, accuracy averages less than 30 percent. If you didn't notice the change, drag the slider in the movie quickly back and forth and you should be able to spot the…
dmunger | March 27, 2006Take a look at these two shapes. Which appears more "joyful"? Which appears fearful?
How about these shapes? Which is angrier? Which appears to be suffering more?
If you're like most people, the shapes that appear to be less stable (number 2 in the figures above) are also more fearful. Those that are rotated more from the vertical position (again, number 2 in the figures) are more suffering and less angry.
Assigning emotions to shapes is nothing new. In experiments as early as the 1940s, individuals have been found to consistently apply the same emotions to shapes in schematic cartoons: "…
dmunger | March 24, 2006One of my pet peeves is when I respond carefully to someone's email and they don't notice that I've addressed several points in one message. They seem to only read the first sentence or two and then move on.
This has made me curious as to how others handle important email messages to make sure their concerns are addressed. We've come up with a short set of questions to see if there are any commonalities about how people handle email. If there's anything we've left out, make sure you let us know in the comments!
As usual, the survey will only take a minute or so of your time. You have until 11…
dmunger | March 24, 2006We received quite a few complaints about last week's Casual Fridays study, most of them centered around our scientifically inaccurate eye exam. In our defense, the Snellen chart is only designed to be a rough measure of visual acuity. General practitioners use it as a first-pass to determine if patients should be referred to eye doctors or optometrists, who always use additional tests beyond the Snellen chart to determine prescriptions.
We're not prescribing eyeglasses, just trying to get a rough sense of respondents' vision. We thought giving a simple test would be easier than asking folks…
dmunger | March 23, 2006What's it like to have all your memories erased? Well, not all your memories, because if that happened, you'd simply be like a newborn infant, and you'd have to relearn everything. The more interesting scenario is to lose only certain memories -- the memories that most people think of as "true" memories: episodic memory.
Memories can be divided into three rough categories: episodic, semantic, and procedural (there are actually many more categories). Procedural memories are the memories of how to do things: driving a car, walking, sewing, and so on. Semantic memories are bits of factual…
dmunger | March 21, 2006What's the best way to ensure that law enforcement officers don't abuse their authority and coerce innocent suspects into confessing? Yesterday we discussed research suggesting that a side-view videotape of a confession was more likely than a head-on view to result in an accurate assessment of whether that confession was voluntary or coerced.
But the Lassiter team's study was still open to some key criticisms. First, the study participants were all college students -- certainly not a typical jury demographic. Second, jurors don't see videotaped confessions in isolation -- when a confession is…