attention
jgoldman | July 26, 2010In general, the ability to attribute attention to others seems important: it allows an animal to notice the presence of other individuals (whether conspecifics, prey, or predators) as well as important locations or events by following the body orientation or eyegaze of others. We've spent a lot of time here at The Thoughtful Animal thinking about how domestication has allowed dogs to occupy a unique niche in the social lives of humans. They readily understand human communication cues such as eye-gaze and finger-pointing, and capitalize on the infant-caregiver attachment system to have their…
edyong | February 23, 2010I grew up in the days of the SNES and the Sega Megadrive. Even then, furious debates would rage about the harm (or lack thereof) that video games would inflict on growing children. A few decades later, little has changed. The debate still rages, fuelled more by the wisdom of repugnance than by data. With little regard for any actual evidence, pundits like Baroness Susan Greenfield, former Director of the Royal Institution, claim that video games negatively "rewire" our brains, infantilising us, depriving us of our very identities and even instigating the financial crisis.
Of course, the fact…
dmunger | December 10, 2009I attended an unusual middle school. It was designed on an "open concept," with the idea that there should be no walls between classrooms. Social pressure would keep the noise levels down, because if kids got too loud, then their peers in other classes would encourage them to hush up. This actually worked most of the time, but one day one of the English teacher's classes was getting out of hand, and after trying several ways to get their attention, she resorted to something a big more dramatic. In a very loud voice, she simply said
SEX!
Her class, and several classes nearby, instantly stared…
dmunger | December 1, 2009If you're a regular reader of Cognitive Daily, you're relatively accustomed to seeing surprising things. Indeed, it's gotten to the point where you might even expect it. You've seen optical illusions and videos that baffle the imagination. Yet most participants in psychology research studies aren't aware of the many ways the mind can be "tricked." One of the most dramatic tricks, which we've discussed several times, is the phenomenon of Change Blindness. An object can change right before your eyes, and you're likely not to notice. When you're made aware of the change, you find it hard to…
dmunger | November 5, 2009Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's not that the administration didn't try to encourage its students to socialize. The library did close at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. There was not one but two film societies, so often students had to choose…
dmunger | October 28, 2009Product placements in movies and TV shows are becoming so commonplace that my kids now cynically take note of them whenever they appear. It wasn't always that way. In 1982 when I first saw E.T. I had no idea that Elliott's use of Reeses' Pieces to lure E.T. into his home was part of a clever marketing ploy that had been pre-arranged with the multinational conglomerate selling the candy. Now that nearly every household has a DVR allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials, advertisers are relying more and more heavily on product placement to show off their wares. But how effective are…
dmunger | October 20, 2009Recently we took our hybrid car into the shop for its annual emissions test. In our state, the test is conducted while the car is idling. A hybrid doesn't actually idle -- it shuts the engine off completely. So our car's emissions were tested at 0 RPM. It may be time to rethink our state's emissions laws.
There's another law that might need rethinking in the age of hybrids. Our car's internal combustion engine often doesn't start up even when the car is moving at low speeds -- it uses electric motors, running nearly silently. This can potentially be dangerous for pedestrians in parking lots…
dmunger | October 1, 2009The other day, our car wouldn't start and Jim had to ask a neighbor over to help him jump-start it. There was much rushing in and out of the house looking for flashlights and other tools to help get the job done. After the neighbor left, Jim wanted to drive somewhere and couldn't find the keys. Clearly he had just had them because he was working on the car. Where could they be? We searched up and down throughout the house, but we couldn't find them and eventually had to use a spare set.
The next morning as I was getting ready to leave for our school carpool in our other car, I found them…
dmunger | September 15, 2009We've talked a lot on Cognitive Daily about change blindness: the inability to spot visual differences between images and even real people and objects right before our eyes. The most dramatic demonstration might be Daniel Simons' "experiment" that took place before participants even knew they were being studied:
More recently researchers have uncovered a similar phenomenon for sounds: Change deafness. Listeners are asked to listen to two one-second clips separated by 350 milliseconds of white noise. The clips are composite sounds, combinations of four different familiar sounds:
If one of…
dmunger | August 25, 2009Take a look at the following picture:
Your job is to look for the one line that's either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. It took me about 25 seconds to find it. Can you do better?
How about now?
A little easier, right?
But the task can be made difficult again by randomly changing the colors of all the other lines in the picture, a few at a time. Now you don't know which flash to look at and the task is just as hard as it was before.
But a team led by Erik Van der Burg found an interesting way to make the task easy again: just add a clicking sound that plays only when the…
dmunger | August 20, 2009We've discussed attentional blink several times on CogDaily. It's a fascinating phenomenon: if you see a series of images flashing by rapidly, you can normally pick out one of the images (for example, a banana in series of pictures of familiar objects). But if a second such image (another piece of fruit, like an apple) appears shortly after the first, you'll probably miss it. The one exception in many cases is faces. This video illustrates the point:
Click here to play the movie
You probably spotted both the piece of fruit and the face in the second sequence, but you may have missed the watch…
ddobbs | July 29, 2009Pardon the long silence. A couple of posts fell to tech issues. And I'd love to blame the hiatus on a vacation.
But mostly I've been off-blog and, for social media purposes, offline, because I've been immersed in writing a long feature. It's a fun, meaty, juicy, really substantial story, one of two great assignments I've been working on this summer. And I'm greatly enjoying it, especially when it goes well. But as I've found before, the longer (and deeper) the feature, the more exclusively I seem to need to give it my attention. Thus the lack of blogging, and of tweets.
I don't seem to mix…
dmunger | July 21, 2009[Originally posted in November 2006]
The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting?
Perhaps, but an important additional question is this: were they predisposed to believe he was armed simply because he was black? Consider this quick movie:
Click to play (QuickTime required)
It will flash two pictures. One man is armed, the other unarmed. Who do you shoot? I've primed you to think about race, so it…
dmunger | June 24, 2009Take a look at the following pictures of U.S. dimes. As you can see, they are slightly different from one another -- the date is in the incorrect spot on one of them. Can you tell which one is "wrong"?
Let's make this a poll:
Which dime has the date in the correct spot?(polls)
Is there anything else wrong with the dimes?(polling)
Don't look at your pocket change before you answer! In case you don't have a dime handy, I'll reveal the correct answer later in the post.
Even though most Americans will say they know what U.S. coins look like, a similar study in 1979 found that people can't…
dmunger | June 23, 2009I've always been amazed by people who are truly bilingual. While I've studied languages in school, I've never been able to seamlessly switch between languages, and even my best non-English language, French, is choppy at best. Compare this to the people I see in restaurants or on the subway, who can have conversations in two languages at once, speaking each language with equal fluency. They might tell a story in English, but save the punch line for Spanish. If a monolingual person talks to them, they instantly respond in the proper language, with hardly a second thought.
There are enough…
dmunger | May 7, 2009Joe and Michelle are having dinner at a romantic restaurant. It's their first anniversary, and everything is perfect -- until an attractive woman walks past the table. Michelle notices that Joe casts a quick glance at the woman. Michelle flashes an annoyed glare at Joe, who knows he's in trouble. "I didn't mean to look at her," he pleads, "guys just can't help it when a pretty woman walks by." Michelle gasps. "B-but she's not as pretty as you," Joe stammers, unpersuasively.
Is it really true that we can't help looking at a pretty face? There's a lot of research suggesting that we notice…
purepedantry | March 27, 2009What you think about during sex matters.
A guy who doesn't want to, ahem, proceed too quickly will think of baseball or something non-sex related. A girl who wants to proceed more quickly might focus on surrounding milieu of a loving environment. These are stereotypes, I know, but the fact that we have them does confirm that what we think about during sex matters: what we attend to changes the nature of the experience.
In this vein, Mind Hacks links to a great review of the role of attention in sex. Vaughan makes the point that we tend to view sexual dysfunction as a problem of…
edyong | March 25, 2009We're used to thinking of neglect as a lack of appropriate care, but to a neuroscientist, it has a very different meaning. "Spatial neglect" is a neurological condition caused by damage to one half of the brain (usually the right), where patients find it difficult to pay attention to one half of their visual space (usually the left).
This bias can affect their mental images too. If neglect patients are asked to draw clocks, many only include the numbers from 12 to 6, while some shunt all the numbers to the right side. When two famous neglect patients were asked to describe a familiar square…
dmunger | March 16, 2009Attentional blink is a fascinating phenomenon that occurs when we see images, words, or numbers presented in a rapid sequence. As images flash by at about one every tenth of a second, you're asked to look for two in particular. If you were looking for numbers in a sequence of letters, the sequence might be SDLX3DJ9WVNBDR. The number 3 would be easy to spot, but 9, which follows 3/10 of a second later, is spotted much less frequently.
The effect works for images as well. You might be asked to look for flowers in a sequence of furniture pictures. Again, flowers that follow between 2/10 and 4/10…
dmunger | March 2, 2009When I'm writing a post for Cognitive Daily (or doing almost any kind of writing, for that matter), I try to keep outside distractions to an absolute minimum. I even have an application on my computer that shuts off all access to the internet for a specified period of time. I find most music distracting, but sometimes I'll play a Mozart piano concerto, which seems to help focus my attention (see here for a possible explanation).
Some people, however, seem to be able to be incredibly productive despite a huge number of distractions -- Twitter status updates, email, crying babies, you name it.…