attention
dmunger | January 3, 2007Watch the quick video below. First you'll fixate on a small dot in the middle of the screen. Then you'll get a visual cue which serves to direct your attention to a particular location. Simultaneously, four letter Os, each colored red or green, will appear. Your task is to say, as quickly as possible, the COLOR of the letter in the direction indicated by the cue.
Now try this one, same task, but with a different cue.
Much research on visual attention during the past 30 years has focused on the difference between these two types of cues -- central arrows versus peripheral indicators such as…
dmunger | November 30, 2006The 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:
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's not really a fair test. If you were a police officer who believed…
dmunger | October 25, 2006Everyone knows the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Bound by that axiom, magazines, newspapers, and most of all, TV, bombard us with pictures every day. The latest hot internet properties aren't text-based sites like Google but picture-based sites like Flickr and YouTube. Psychological research backs this up: we do remember pictures more readily than we remember words.
The next question, of course, is "why?" Recent research by Paul W. Foos and Paula Goolkasian is beginning to shed light on the difference between memory for pictures and words. They had previously found that while…
dmunger | September 29, 2006Occasionally you read a journal article so well-titled, you have to steal it for your blog post title. "Smells Like Clean Spirit" is a report by Rob Holland, Merel Hendricks, and Henk Aarts, in which they use smells to unconsciously modify their victims' participants' behavior.
In some ways, this research is nothing new. As the researchers point out, if we smell chocolate chip cookies, we may decide to eat; if we smell a garbage truck, we may walk faster down the street. We might associate pine scent with Christmas, or pheromones with sex. But most of these associations involve people being…
dmunger | September 6, 2006Sometimes we think of emotions as completely separate from the more "objective" parts of the mind. You might believe that emotion can sometimes cloud your judgment, but it certainly can't affect your vision system. Or can it?
Take a look at the following image. It's my attempt to use Photoshop to make a Gabor patch -- a means of testing vision.
Gabor patches are useful because researchers can systematically vary their contrast and determine the limits of the visual system. For example, try this quick movie. The screen will remain blank for a second, then quickly flash four Gabor patches.…
dmunger | August 24, 2006
Last year, my dad got his pilot's license. He took me up with him a couple months later, and while the view was spectacular, the most surprising aspect of flying is how much of a pilot's time is spent avoiding other aircraft. You might think there's plenty of room up there, and you'd be right, but it also means you have to scan a vast space to locate other planes. Once you spot one, you need to keep track of it to make sure you're not on a collision course. Sometimes, you'll need to track four or more other planes. Is there a limit to how many objects we can track? And how, exactly, do we…
dmunger | August 3, 2006[originally published March 2, 2005]
Take a look at the following movie (quicktime required). The movie will alternately flash a picture of a desk and a patterned block. Your job is to see if anything about the picture of the desk changes each time it flashes. Don't replay the movie when you get to the end; just stop.
Did you notice any changes? Most people won't spot any changes at all when they watch this movie the first time. But watch the image as you press play again, and you'll see that the desk has changed significantly from the beginning to the end of the movie. I actually rotated…
dmunger | July 27, 2006[originally posted December 9, 2005]
A few months ago, Jon Stewart opened the eyes of his Daily Show audience when he interviewed the author of the book On Bullshit. Viewers accustomed to hearing the familiar bleep when Stewart enters foul-mouth mode were surprised to find that the word came through completely uncensored. Stewart himself reveled in his new freedom, repeating the word "bullshit" dozens of times over the course of the interview. It was difficult not to notice the word every time he spoke it.
Adam K. Anderson of the University of Toronto, who specializes in studying attention,…
dmunger | July 5, 2006"Keep your eye on the ball" is a mantra I've heard applied to several sports: baseball, for hitting, football, for receiving, and golf, for teeing it up. It wasn't surprising to me when I read recently that cricketers also use this platitude to teach batsmen how to hit effectively.
The sum total of my experience with cricket is watching multi-ethic games in Van Cortland Park through our Bronx apartment window while Greta and I were finishing graduate school about 12 years ago. I didn't pick up on many of the rules, but I was stunned to see that cricketers, unlike baseball players, actually…
dmunger | June 29, 2006One of the amazing things about the Stroop Effect is how much good research is being done based on this simple phenomenon, over 70 years later. One of the neatest recent experiments was created by Peter Wühr and Florian Waszak. I think I've created a simple animation that replicates their results. Click on the image below to bring up a short animated GIF. You'll see an image flash quickly, followed by a blank screen. As quickly as possible after the image flashes, say the color of the rectangle in front. Ignore any words printed on the rectangles; you just want to name the color of the…
dmunger | June 14, 2006In many ways, my career has been dominated by efforts to make "work" bear as much resemblance to "having fun" as possible. Today's article only confirms that rule. Yesterday afternoon, I spent an hour watching a World Cup soccer match, and for once I could claim that it was completely relevant to work. I could still remember Diego Maradona's stunning 1986 run through the center of the English defense as vividly as if it happened yesterday, and was hoping to form a similarly vivid memory. Unfortunately, yesterday's lackluster 0-0 tie between France and Switzerland didn't provide me with…
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 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 | 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 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 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 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 9, 2006We've reported on studies about cell phones and driving before. A general consensus has formed that driving with cell phones (even hands-free phones) is dangerous. What matters most, it appears, isn't so much the physical aspect -- holding and operating the phone -- but how demanding the conversation itself is.
Research on aging has suggested that older drivers may be even more impaired by driving with a cell phone than younger drivers, since older adults tend to perform worse on "dual task" activities than younger adults. But what about the years of driving experience that older adults have…
dmunger | February 23, 2006Since yesterday's post on attention grabbed so much, well, attention, let's try another one. Only this time, instead of looking at what factors cause us to pay attention to something, we'll consider an experiment that studied the emotional effects of attention. If you're asked to look for people with blond hair, for example, you may eventually come to have a different emotional response to people with blond hair than others.
A team led by Mark Fenske developed a simple procedure to see if the focus of our attention can affect emotion. Twenty-four college students participated in a task that…