General / Site news
dmunger | June 26, 2009Jemsite, a website, forum and blog about guitars, has posted a fairly extensive interview with me about the psychology of music, Cognitive Daily, and other projects I'm working on. Plus, you can find out the name of Jim's Southern rock band, so head on over and check it out!
dmunger | June 5, 2009We'll be hosting Encephalon here at CogDaily on Monday -- it's a bimonthly festival of the best cognitive / neuroscience blog posts on the web. If you've got a post you'd like to see included, send an email to encephalon -- . -- host -- @ -- gmail -- . -- com (remove dashes).
In other site news, this week we're moving to our summer schedule, which means, due to our travel schedule, Casual Fridays are on hiatus until the fall. Also, you might see a few more repeat posts than usual. We'll try to stay on top of things, but in general, you should expect to see posts a little less frequently. Don'…
dmunger | April 30, 2009Today we're introducing a new feature on Cognitive Daily. Every month, in addition to our regular blog posts, we're going to create a downloadable mini-book (or maxi-article, take your pick) about an issue related to cognitive psychology. Surprise, surprise, it's called Cognitive Monthly.
Although based on posts that have appeared in CogDaily, it goes beyond what's in the blog, synthesizing and incorporating interviews and other insights. The first issue (May 2009) comes out today!
This month's report, "The Illusion of Theater," covers the remarkable science behind what theatrical…
dmunger | February 10, 2009I'm having a dispute with a reader in an online forum. Let's settle it here with a quick, private poll:
What is your sexual orientation? ( surveys)
Trust me, this is related to psychology.
dmunger | February 6, 2009Sorry, this week's Casual Friday results won't be ready until tomorrow. There's lots of interesting data, and I want to make sure I do it justice.
dmunger | November 20, 2008Here are the four posts that I selected to nominate for Open Laboratory 2008, the collection of the best science blog posts of the year:
Toddlers play with impossibly small toys as if they're the real thing
Will video games solve sex-discrimination in science?
How to make your eye feel like it's closed, when it's actually open
Changing belief in free will can cause students to cheat
Disagree with my choices? You can nominate one yourself, here. But remember that the post has to work in book form (with some adaptation). I had to pass over some great posts because they included videos or…
dmunger | November 17, 2008I've set up accounts on FriendFeed and Twitter with the username davemunger. I'm going to give these sites a try for the next week or so. Unlike with Facebook where we've got a profile but haven't really done much, I'd actually like to actively participate in these networks.
I'd appreciate any tips readers have for getting established there, and any other similar sites that it might be useful to be a part of. Ideally these sites would link back in to FriendFeed so I only have to check up on one site. And of course, if you'd like to follow my feed, you're welcome to.
dmunger | November 14, 2008Greta and I will be participating in a panel on blogging tomorrow in Charlotte, NC. If you're in town, you might want to stop by. More information here.
dmunger | November 10, 2008Today I'm visiting Shireen Campbell's class at Davidson College to talk about Cognitive Daily and other writing projects. This post collects the links I'll be using for class. If you're not in the class they might not be relevant to you, but they include some of our most popular posts, so maybe you'll enjoy reading them too!
Violent video games may be linked to aggression
More on video game violence
Is 17 the "most random" number?
How to report scientific research to a general audience
How we learn to walk
Dave's first blog
Dave's personal blog
For more, new links about psychology and…
dmunger | October 28, 2008Encephalon is up at Mind Hacks! Go check it out!
Greta and I are off to vote today, so you'll have to get your psychology fix over there.
Oh, and out of curiousity:
Have you voted yet? ( surveys)
dmunger | September 16, 2008Greta and I will be at the North Carolina Zoo this coming Saturday, September 20, to meet with readers and practically all of the North Carolina ScienceBloggers. We've arranged a special tour of the zoo with an expert member of the zoo staff, a party afterwards at a local watering hole, and now, ScienceBlogs will provide tickets to the zoo too!
Not only will Greta and I be there, you can also meet Bora Zivkovic, Sheril Kirshenbaum, James Hrynyshyn, Abel PharmBoy, ScienceWoman, Kevin Zelnio, SciCurious, and Russ Williams, along with many of our kids!
This party is one of several taking place…
dmunger | September 2, 2008On Saturday, September 20, the action in North Carolina will be at the Asheboro zoo. All the North Carolina ScienceBloggers will be there, and you can too -- there will be a guided tour of the zoo led by one of their staffers, a get-together afterwards with tons of zoo staffers and volunteers, and food and beverages at a local watering hole later!
This is all in celebration of ScienceBlogs' millionth comment, which, if all goes as expected, will be appearing on one of our blogs sometime in the next two weeks. If you don't live in North Carolina, you can meet Sciblings and fellow-readers at…
dmunger | July 30, 2008Cognitive Daily gets a lot of complaints about graphs, mostly from readers who say the graphs are useless without error bars. My response is that error bars are confusing to most readers. But perhaps I'm wrong about that. Last year I posted about this issue, and backed it up with a short quiz about error bars, which most of our readers failed. After another 16 months of Cognitive Daily, maybe they've improved. So here's the test again.
Take a look at this graph. It represents a fictional experiment where two different groups of 50 people took a memory test. The mean scores of each group are…
dmunger | July 25, 2008I'm about to head out of town for three weeks. You may have noticed posting getting lighter the last couple weeks as I attempted to tie up loose ends before the trip. Posting will be getting even lighter for the next three weeks as I head west to visit family. Then, a week from now, Nora and I will be heading out into the true wilderness, miles out of range of any cell phone tower, and certainly out of reach of the internet.
Here's a description of part of our route:
One of Washington's granddaddy trails, Boundary Trail runs across the entirety of America's largest wilderness, the Pasayten.…
dmunger | July 8, 2008Last year when the family was in Europe I snapped this photo of Jim looking at a triptych of three blank canvases:
The accompanying blog post generated heated discussion about whether the work depicted in the photo was "art" (the discussion became so heated that I decided to close the comments on the thread). Now the photo itself has been used (with our permission) in the brochure for a Danish firm that specializes in placing artwork in business environments:
So, now, is the photo itself a work of art? Some of the arguments that were made in the original debate might be pertinent. Maybe…
dmunger | June 25, 2008We're still working hard on getting the next version of ResearchBlogging.org ready to go. I know this is taking a long time, but since we have a (semi) working system right now, we really want to get this right. It shouldn't be too much longer. A few weeks ago we settled on a new list of major topics for the site. Here they are:
Anthropology
Astronomy
Biology
Chemistry
Clinical Research
Computer Science
Engineering
Geosciences
Health
Mathematics
Neuroscience
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Social Science
Research / Scholarship
Other
Now we'd like to generate the subtopics associated with each…
gmunger | May 21, 2008Cognitive Daily is a reflection of my teaching. In fact, one of the ways I pick articles for Dave to discuss on the blog is to pass along articles I've used in class. It has occurred to us that our Research categories (like Movement and Exercise, or Video Games / Technology) are not the most helpful for teachers seeking new examples, and so I've indexed some of the blog posts using categories that are more familiar to general and cognitive psychology teachers.
You'll find it under the new tab Teaching Index, where topics are listed in the order many psychology textbooks follow (biological…
dmunger | May 5, 2008Last week's post on perceptual restoration in toddlers brought a lot of speculation from commenters. To answer some of the questions, I thought I'd elaborate a bit here on the phenomenon and how I created the demo.
First, here's the original recording again, with me saying "dinosaur" three times:
In the first case, I edited out the "s" sound, and everyone with normal hearing can hear that. The last "dinosaur" is complete. Did I edit out the "s" in the middle dinosaur?
Most adults believe they hear the "s" sound in cases like this, even if the sound has been edited out: the perceptual system…
dmunger | April 16, 2008The 43rd Encephalon is available over at GNIF Brain Blogger. It's a fantastic collection of the best psychology and neuroscience blogging from the past two weeks.
The next Encephalon will be hosted right here at Cognitive Daily on April 28. To submit your posts about psychology and neuroscience, email encephalon {dot} host [at] gmail {dot} com.
dmunger | April 11, 2008Sorry, no Casual Friday this week -- I'm frantically finishing up our tax returns.
We actually did a Casual Friday about tax procrastination a couple years back though, so if you need a Casual Friday fix, check that one out:
Casual Fridays: Dave FINALLY finishes analyzing the procrastination data.