dmunger | January 24, 2006January 27 is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 250th birthday. In honor of the event, Greta Munger is giving a talk entitled "In the Mood: The Real Mozart Effect" discussing how scientific research addresses the claim that listening to the music of Mozart actually makes you more intelligent.
If you're in the area of Davidson, NC (about 20 miles north of Charlotte), stop by and see her talk, along with several others presented on this special day, including "Mozart in Hollywood" by Neil Lerner and "Grief, Denial, and a Piano Sonata" by Mauro Bothello. The talks are free, and start at 2:30 in Tyler-…
dmunger | January 23, 2006When I was a kid, school lunches didn't offer choice. I paid $1.10, and I was given four plops of foodlike substance. The entrees had names like "salisbury steak," "lasagne," or "beef stroganoff," but they all tasted about the same. Our "vegetable" was usually overcooked peas or green beans. There was a "starch," like mashed potatoes or a roll, and a dessert -- Jell-O or a cupcake -- typically the only edible item on the tray. If our lunch money wasn't stolen on the way to school, we were at least in theory presented with a balanced meal.
By the time my kids were in school, cafeteria…
dmunger | January 20, 2006This week's study is a simple test. You'll first be directed to a Quicktime movie of a painting. The painting will flash repeatedly, changing slighly between flashes. You have 9 seconds to identify the change; then your browser will automatically redirect to a survey, with (as usual) 5 questions to answer (most important, of course: what changes in the picture?). The whole thing should take less than a minute to do, so why not give it a whirl?
Make sure you're ready to look closely at a flashing picture before you click on the link to start!
UPDATE: We've received 250 responses, in record…
dmunger | January 20, 2006The results of the first Casual Friday survey are in, and I have to say, I'm impressed at the level of response. Greta mentioned to one of her colleagues that we had collected 213 responses in five days, and his eyes lit up with excitement. Just to give you an idea of how large this sample is, Davidson College's psychology department has around 200 participant slots for an entire semester.
Granted, we wouldn't have achieved the level of response we got if our survey had been a 200 question monster, but even with just five questions, we were able to get significant results.
Now, about those…
dmunger | January 19, 2006To say college students* aren't well-known for their efficient sleep habits might be the most dramatic understatement since Washington observed that Valley Forge winters are "a bit nippy." I can remember dozing off with my head in a pile of books at the library when I was in college, then waking with "The Riverside Chaucer" imprinted on my face in mirror-image.
Undaunted by college students' reputation for irregular sleep, a group of researchers conducted a large study of Ohio State University students' sleeping habits. Among the many questions they attempted to answer was a simple one: how…
dmunger | January 18, 2006Chad Orzel has challenged the ScienceBloggers to come up with the greatest experiments in their respective fields. While Greta and I are reluctant to say this is the greatest experiment ever (there are so many great experiments!), we both independently came up with the same one: Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler's 1971 experiment on mental rotation. It's certainly our favorite, and it's difficult to overstate its importance.
The design of the experiment is simple and brilliant; yet it was not easy to execute at the time. Today researchers studying vision almost always use computers to…
dmunger | January 17, 2006Point-light displays can tell us an amazing amount about other people. Looking only at a few glowing spots corresponding to joints and set in motion, we can tell what people are doing, whether they are over- or underweight, and even identify a friend among strangers. We can also identify animals or determine the emotional state a dancer or actor is conveying. But some emotions are more difficult than others. Take a look at the following two animations (click on the image to view a quicktime movie):
Now, which emotion does each animation convey? Your choices are Anger, Joy, Sadness, Love,…
dmunger | January 13, 2006Now that we're settling in to our new home, we'd like to introduce a fun new feature to Cognitive Daily: Casual Fridays. Every Friday, we'll post a quick, nonscientific survey or experiment for you to participate in.
These "studies" will be very, very short -- fewer than five questions for surveys, and for experiments, the stimuli will require no more than a moment or two of your attention. But with the power of thousands of Cognitive Daily visitors, we may be able to obtain some results that approach statistical significance.
The goal is not to duplicate a laboratory experiment or a…
dmunger | January 12, 2006There was a fascinating article in the Washington Post last May about Dilbert creator Scott Adams' battle with focal dystonia. Though the symptoms of this disorder are involuntary muscle contractions (in Adams' case, his right pinky finger), the root of the problem is in the brain. For Adams, it has meant suspending his cartooning career more than once. The first time, he taught himself to draw with his left hand, only to see the symptoms reappear there. He's also tried grueling physical therapy regimens. His most recent effort to battle dystonia has been drawing his cartoons using a…
dmunger | January 11, 2006Welcome to the new Cognitive Daily! If you've been a regular visitor to the old Cognitive Daily, then I don't expect you'll find much has changed. Cognitive Daily, whether in our old digs or with our snazzy new host, is a great place to read about peer-reviewed psychology research explained in language that everyone can understand. And if there's something you don't understand, or if you'd like to engage in a more in-depth discussion of an issue, feel free to ask a question in the comments section.
In the past we've had some great discussions, ranging from the impact of video games to the…
dmunger | January 10, 2006The Flying Spaghetti Monster (source: verganza.org) is a satirical retort to advocates of "intelligent design," created as a joke to mock the belief that some "intelligent designer" created life. While the Flying Spaghetti Monster is funny, no one takes it seriously. Meanwhile, belief in a Christian God is stronger than ever, and advocates of the theory of evolution are unshaking in their support.
So what's the difference? Why do people hold some beliefs strongly, but readily discard others? Jesse Preston and Nicholas Epley have designed a technique to examine the types of evidence people…
dmunger | January 6, 2006My son Jim loved his bottle when he was a baby. By about 15 months of age, he loved baby formula so much that he was going through over a hundred dollars' worth a week -- more than the rest of the food budget for the entire family! (Yes, we were buying the powdered stuff, not pre-made formula.) There were weeks when we completely exhausted the local grocery store's supply.
Needless to say, soon his pediatrician pointed out he was gaining weight too quickly, and we should cut his rations down to, say, three bottles a day. It was a painful transition. Previously, all Jim would have to do was…
dmunger | January 4, 2006Much of the research on violent video games, like a vast proportion of all psychological research, has focused on college students. This shouldn't be surprising, since most college psychology departments require students to participate in experiments as a part of the Introduction to Psychology course. It's an easy way for researchers to find human participants, and a great way for students to learn how real research is done. Research results for college students often are equivalent to the population as a whole, and even when they aren't, college students can establish a baseline to compare…
dmunger | January 3, 2006Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five. Now that real robots are beginning to be everyday household items (when I was a kid, if I'd known I'd be able to buy a vacuum-cleaner robot from Sears when I was a grown-up, I'd be ashamed to learn that I never actually bought one!), one wonders how real kids will respond to them.
When, for example, might a child begin to believe that a robot has a conscious mind, and that humans might…
dmunger | December 30, 2005What is your mind doing when you think about something? For decades, the prevailing wisdom was that when you imagine, say, the scent of a flower or your lover's perfume, your mind is doing something different from when you actually smell those things. The metaphor was a computer: The hardware for sensing things was distinct from the software for thinking about things.
More recent evidence suggests that the way we understand concepts relies on the sensorimotor system. When you think of the sound of a dripping faucet, the same parts of your brain are activated as when you are actually hearing a…
dmunger | December 27, 2005Toddlers learn new words at an astonishing rate—an average, according to Steven Pinker, of over a word every two hours. Yet attempts to drill children to improve vocabulary are often frustrating. Kids seem to learn words better through observing the environment than they do by rote. So what exactly are they observing?
One possibility is that the child is paying attention to what others are looking at: if a grown-up looks at a construction site and says "look at the bulldozer," maybe kids learn "bulldozer" because they have learned to follow the grown-up's gaze. Another possibility is that…
dmunger | December 26, 2005How do we know when we see a beautiful body? Is it some social standard such as thinness or proportion? Do we simply think that bodies that are closest to "normal" are also most beautiful? We know that to be the case with faces, where faces that closest to "average" are generally rated as more attractive than others which deviate, and faces that combine the characteristics of several races are rated as more attractive than those typical of a particular race.
We've written before on how our perception of faces can be altered. If you look at faces that have been systematically distorted to look…
dmunger | December 21, 2005There is little doubt that the cognitive demands of conversation can affect our awareness of the world around us. Everyone has a story of a near-miss collision with some clueless airhead driving who was jabbering away on the cell phone. A co-worker once tearfully told me of the time she was in an argument with her boyfriend while parked in his car at the side of the road. Furious, he got out of the car and slammed the door. He never noticed the passing car that hit him and instantly killed him. Was this a freak accident, or does conversation—and not just cell phone conversation—impair our…
dmunger | December 19, 2005We learned from Alas, a Blog that Henry Jenkins has written an essay for PBS about video games, making the case that the public doesn't understand what the games are all about. Normally articles here on Cognitive Daily only report on peer-reviewed research, but in this case, we felt it was important to make an exception. We feel that Jenkins makes some misleading statements in his essay, and we'd like to take this opportunity to point our readers to some research showing why this is so.
I've used indented quotations to give snippets from Jenkins' argument; my responses are in normal text.…
dmunger | December 16, 2005We've written before about how stereotypes can impair performance on math tests: for example, when women are told they are taking a math test for a study about gender differences in math ability, they perform more poorly than men. However, if they are first taught about how stereotypes can impair performance, their scores rise to equality with men.
But what about the other side of the stereotype spectrum? When people are expected to perform better due to a stereotype, how do those expectations affect performance? One possible answer is that they will perform even better. Another possibility…