memory
dmunger | November 29, 2005Do you ever wonder if your mood affects the way you think? I'm not talking about behaving more aggressively when you're angry or more passively when you're sad; I'm talking about the subtler impact on cognitive processing. Some recent research has indicated that we process things differently depending on whether we're in a positive or negative mood. People in good moods tend to make more connections between related items, while people in bad moods generally focus on what's in front of them.
Justin Storbeck and Gerald L. Clore realized that there may be a connection between this research on…
dmunger | November 17, 2005One of the gimmicks of the 1948 film Words and Music was the question of which is more important in a song—the words or the music.
Source: SoundtrackCollector
The movie, a fictionalization of the lives of the legendary team of Broadway writers Richard Rogers (music) and Lorenz Hart (words), only addresses its titular conflict obliquely. The implicit answer, of course, is that you can't have one without the other.
Or can you? While it's difficult or perhaps impossible to scientifically determine whether words or music is more important in a song, Isabelle Peretz, Monique Radeau, and…
dmunger | November 8, 2005In face to face conversation, we often look away from the person we're speaking with. Somewhat paradoxically, the closer people sit to their conversation companions, the less often they look at them.
But other factors influence how often we avert our gaze, too. When we are asked personal questions, or difficult questions, or possibly when we are trying to deceive, we look away more often. When we talk with someone via a remote video monitor, we look at them more often than when we engage in the same type of conversation face to face.
So what's the cause of this behavior? Do several different…
dmunger | November 7, 2005What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her on television. Could she be the manager of your local bank? Perhaps you don't know her at all ... but you've still got a feeling you do. What's that all about?
One theory of memory proposes that what we remember depends on our expectations. We're less likely to remember our old classmate at the coffee shop than at the high school reunion. At the bank, we might greet the manager by name, but we only get a vague sense of…
dmunger | October 26, 2005I had a friend in college who was a baseball genius. He could offer up the career stats of every player in the hall of fame; he knew which teams had won the World Series in each year since its inception—he was a great guy to have on your Trivial Pursuit team; the sports category was a gimme for him.
Whether it's sports, molecular biology, or quilting, everyone seems to know someone who's an expert in their field, who seems to possess an inhuman amount of knowledge about their area of expertise. What makes these individuals so special? Part of this expertise seems to be related to the…
dmunger | October 5, 2005The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, is a full-scale reconstruction of the rather more famous monument atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. We visited it with our daughter Nora a few years back:
As you can see, it's a dramatic building, dominating the landscape of the otherwise ordinary city park in which it sits. So, when we're confronted with such a massive landmark, do we use it to organize the surrounding area as well? Several studies have shown that we do pay attention to the surroundings of objects in order to remember their location. If we memorize the locations of a number of…
dmunger | October 3, 2005It often doesn't take much to make an eyewitness to a crime change her or his story. While Mafia hardball tactics for intimidating witnesses make the headlines, just seeing or hearing a different version of the "facts" can be enough. One key (as we've discussed before) is remembering the context for an event. If we can successfully recall that we personally witnessed one version of the story as it occurred last Thursday, then we're more likely to realize that it's different from the article we read in the newspaper the next day. If we don't recall the context of either the original version…
dmunger | August 1, 2005In every courtroom drama, the most dramatic scene is always when the star witness points her finger at the villain and proclaims that "he did it!" The confidence with which an eyewitness describes the perpetrator of a crime is often the most convincing evidence in a court battle. But how accurate is eyewitness testimony? Do we really remember everything as accurately as we think we do? How important are other influences on eyewitness testimony? And what if the witness is a child?
Carl Martin Allwood has been working on these issues for years. In his most recent article, co-authored with Anna-…
dmunger | July 22, 2005I've created a quick animation of distorted pictures of my son Jim, together with some normal ones. Take a minute or so to watch the animation, then decide if the last picture you're shown looks "normal" to you. Click on the normal (but pre-eyeglasses and braces) photo of Jim below to begin:
I'll let you know whether or not the final picture was distorted in the comments.
A large body of research has found that we perceive faces that are closer to the average as more beautiful than distinctive faces. We've written about one such study here, but even more surprisingly other experiments have…
dmunger | July 14, 2005We've reported on flashbulb memory before, with the Talarico and Rubin study and the MacKay and Ahmetzanov study. First observed in 1977 by Brown and Kulik, flashbulb memories—memories about shocking events—were supposed to be more vivid and long-lasting than normal memories. Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin seemed to have put a damper on the whole concept of flashbulb memory with their finding that while flashbulb memories are more intense and people are more confident about them, they are no more accurate than normal memories. Donald MacKay and Marat Ahmetzanov, using an experimental test…
dmunger | July 6, 2005Today's article is one of my all-time favorites. It was originally written by Katherine Kiechel, an undergraduate at Williams College as part of her honors thesis, and could serve as a model for others in its simplicity and ingenuity (the report I'm discussing here was revised and coauthored by her professor, Saul Kassin: "The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation," Psychological Science, 1996). Some empirical work has been done on false confessions, and at least one example of a genuine false confession has been reported: Paul Ingram, who…
dmunger | June 24, 2005I like rock music, but my father-in-law doesn't. My son Jim likes horror movies, but his mom doesn't. While some of our preferences can be explained easily—for example, we usually don't like things that cause us pain—others are more difficult to understand. When there's not an obvious reason for a preference, mere exposure to an item can lead to preference. Studies have found this "mere exposure effect" for words, photos, objects—nearly anything, really.
What's less certain is what causes the mere exposure effect: two competing explanations have been proposed. The first is the uncertainty…
dmunger | June 22, 2005Today's research psychologists typically don't think much of Sigmund Freud. His theories, which tended to be based on literary analysis and interviews with his patients rather than controlled experiments, have been largely discredited (though they continue to be influential in the field of—you guessed it—literary analysis). However, he did discover an important phenomenon which continues to be investigated today. Freud noted that adults do not remember childhood events occurring before they were as old as six. This period of childhood amnesia is now generally believed to end at about age…
dmunger | June 17, 2005There's been a great deal of research on appetite and satiation, both on animals and humans. For humans, of course, the motivation is often focused on how we can lose weight. Almost everyone believes they would look better if they could just lose a few pounds. Most of the research has focused on the taste of food and the physical sensation of fullness, and the results—as you might have suspected—have been inconclusive.
There is some evidence that if you leave the remnants of a meal around (used candy wrappers, for example), then people will eat less than if the evidence of the food is…
dmunger | June 8, 2005When I started work on a memoir about my childhood, I thought remembering what actually happened would be the easy part. I had very specific memories of very specific events, and I wrote them down exactly as I remembered them. One memory involved my stepsister winning Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy album at a pumpkin carving contest in 1974. I remember it as clear as the day it happened. Only Rhinestone Cowboy was released in 1975.
At about that same time, Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving were conducting the experiment that formed the basis a new framework of human memory: we don't remember…
dmunger | May 30, 2005The allure of music has been a recurring question for psychologists. Why do we see the need for music? Is music like language, or is it something entirely different? The attempts to answer the latter question have generated mixed results. Musicians with brain damage have retained musical ability while losing language ability. Some patients with a condition called amusia can recognize songs from their lyrics but not from the melody. On the other hand, healthy people remember melodies better when they are repeated with their original lyrics instead of the words from other songs.
Listen to the…
dmunger | May 25, 2005Take a look at the following maps of brain activity:
The maps were made using ERP recordings of volunteers' brains as they were tested for memory of pictures. The ERP (event-related potential) records electrical potentials using a variety of electrodes (primarily EEGs, or electroencephalograms) placed on the scalp. The white regions of the diagrams represent areas of greater brain activity. What's striking about the diagrams is that while for the most part they are similar, kids' brains show a strikingly different pattern for memory of the context of an item than adults do.
To understand…
dmunger | May 18, 2005Some people—even people who really know their stuff—just don't "test well." You can talk to them face to face, and they seem perfectly well informed and intelligent, but when the money's on the line, when they've sharpened their number 2 pencils and it's time to sit down for the big exam, they just crumble.
Of course, others simply use "not testing well" as an excuse for true slackerdom, but mere laziness can't explain the fact that many otherwise well-prepared students don't perform well under pressure. They score well on the practice SAT, but not on the official test that determines their…
dmunger | May 17, 2005We know that video games can help us learn, but what exactly is it about the games that does it? Is it that fact that we're in control—for example, the way drivers in a car seem to learn the roads better than passengers? Or is it something else? Paul Wilson of the University of Leicester and Patrick Péruch of Université de la Méditerranée had been working on this problem separately for several years, with mixed results. In 2002 they combined their efforts to try to figure out what matters most for learning in a virtual environment ("The Influence of Interactivity and Attention on Spatial…
dmunger | May 5, 2005The Stroop effect is a well-documented phenomenon that shows how easily we can be distracted from a simple task. In the classic Stroop experiment, we are shown a word, such as GREEN, and asked to indicate the color it is printed in. When the meaning of the word itself conflicts with the word's color, the task is more difficult. There's a good demo of the effect here. Go ahead and try it—it's easy and it only takes about 30 seconds. If you're like most people, you will take longer to respond to the words that are printed in an incongruent color.
The Stroop task can also be used to measure…