News
dmunger | December 13, 2006How often do you see a face that you know you've seen before, but you simply can't connect a name to? If you're like me, it happens nearly every day. Face recognition experts know this is because our brains are hard-wired to recall specific faces. The semantic information about those faces is stored separately.
But faces are complex -- especially when we need to remember enough about a face to distinguish it from others. If we're presented with just a glimpse of a face, is that enough to place it in memory? A new study by Kim Curby and Isabel Gauthier examined that question:
Study…
dmunger | December 12, 2006
The red oval on the right represents a known eBay fraudster. How can we use that information to locate others? Follow the interactions. Fraudulent eBay users typically build up their online "reputation" by conducting transactions with accomplices who give them phony "positive" feedback. These accomplices, a research team at Carnegie Mellon has found, typically interact with many fraudsters. If an eBay user transacts with many known accomplices, who aren't themselves engaging in fraud but have given positive feedback to fraudsters, then they may be a fraudster themselves. Thus, the two "…
dmunger | December 11, 2006I have a vague memory of having written something about curse words on Cognitive Daily before. However, I'm almost certain I've never written about false memories in children. Maybe something about eyewitness testimony, but not false memories.
You probably know the punch line: I've written about all those things. So why do I remember the study about swearing better than the others?
Chris at Mixing Memory discusses a study which shows that we remember both "taboo words" -- and the context in which they were presented -- better than other words. The six-experiment study involved memorizing…
dmunger | December 8, 2006Tomorrow I'll be running my first-ever (and possibly my last) half-marathon. I've been an amateur runner since high school, but the longest race I'd run in previously was a 10K race, less than half this distance, nearly 20 years ago. I haven't run competitively since college, but I have consistently run around three miles a day for nearly that entire span. It was just this summer that I decided to go for the half-marathon, and I've upped my training regimen to include runs as long as 12 miles. But tomorrow's 13.1 mile race will be the longest I've ever run. What can I look forward to?
How…
dmunger | December 7, 2006The Neurocritic has a fascinating report on recent research exploring memory interference. One of the primary problems with memory is deciding what to remember and what to forget. As an example of the scale of the problem, if we recorded every image we ever saw in its raw format, we'd soon exhaust our memory reserves. And what if we remembered every word we'd ever read, instead of recalling the larger sense of what we learn? Again, eventually we'd run out of space.
When we encounter new images or words, we must decide which memories should be discarded, and which we should keep. Memory…
dmunger | December 6, 2006When someone gets lost in the woods -- or when a convict escapes from prison -- finding them among the vast expanse of trees and other features can be a daunting task. Often search parties literally walk in lines just a few feet apart to scour the terrain for evidence. But perhaps there's an easier way to find signs of life. When cNet editor James Kim and his family went missing last week somewhere in Oregon, Matt Haughey had an idea about how to find them:
I've seen some pretty amazing stuff come out of MetaFilter, when people collaborate on a real world problem. Then it hit me. There are…
dmunger | December 5, 2006Steven Pinker points out in The Language Instinct that the potential ambiguities in any sentence makes programming computers to understand language quite difficult: humans can quickly determine the appropriate interpretation through context; computers are unable to understand context, and therefore they flounder, and so have difficulty translating texts. The sentence "Time flies like an arrow," for example, can be interpreted in five different ways. Here are just a couple of ways:
When timing houseflies, time them in the same manner in which you time arrowsA type of fly, a "time fly," enjoys…
dmunger | December 1, 2006Apropos of yesterday's post about irresponsible journalism. Here's what happens when you misuse the term "inherit." In the World Science entry:
A study has led reÂsearchÂers to specÂuÂlate that career sucÂcess may be partÂly geÂneÂtic.
The supÂpoÂsiÂtion rests in partÂiÂcuÂlar on two new findÂings, the inÂvesÂtiÂgaÂtors said: that willÂingÂness both to take risks and to trust felÂlow huÂmans seem inÂherÂitÂed. Since asÂtute judgÂment in both areÂnas are cruÂcial to sucÂcess in busiÂness and a range of othÂer fields, that itÂself might be heÂredÂiÂtary, they reaÂsoned.
Now, here's what the…
dmunger | November 30, 2006An article in ScienceDaily proclaims Success A Family Affair? Willingness To Take Risks And Trust Others Are Inherited, Study Suggests.
Actually, the study suggests the opposite: C only that children have similar risk profiles to their parents. This indicates that risk-taking behavior isn't inherited, but learned. I This study can't show whether the trait was inherited, learned, or acquired through a combination of both. For example, if it was inherited, then it might be the case that sometimes kids would be riskier than their parents, and sometimes less risky -- just like brunette parents…
dmunger | November 29, 2006Is it really possible for child in a destitute situation to rise above it and become not only a productive member of society, but to excel? Jonah Lehrer discusses an important New York Times article that I had skipped over the first time I saw the headline on the site. Jonah was most interested in the research that shows the difference in childrearing in affluent versus impoverished homes:
By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000…
dmunger | November 28, 2006Uber-geek David Pogue has completed a Casual-Friday-worthy study of the human perceptual system. He wanted to test the "megapixel myth" -- the idea that buying a higher megapixel camera doesn't necessarily mean that you will take better pictures. He made poster-size prints of the same photo at different pixel resolutions: 5, 8, and 13 megapixels, then asked passersby to judge which was which. Ninety-five percent didn't even try, and only one of those who attempted was able to correctly identify the photos.
But doesn't the human eye have a full 576 megapixels of resolution? Something must be…
dmunger | November 27, 2006New research shows that Asian Americans have a very different understanding of consequences than European Americans: While European Americans say that a single pool shot has a bigger influence on the next shot, when asked about its influence several shots down the line, Asian Americans rate the first shot as more important compared to European Americans. Other, similar approaches across a wide variety of scenarios have found similar results.
But Chris of Mixing Memory is frustrated with this type of research:
It's pretty easy to see how these results could be a consequence of holistic vs.…
dmunger | November 21, 2006Watch this video and describe what you see (it's a Windows Media file, so if you've got a Mac, you'll need Flip4Mac):
What happened to the ball? Just watch the movie once, then give your response in the poll:
This movie is one of the stimuli for an experiment by Gustav Kuhn and Michael Land, which tries to understand why we are fooled by magic tricks. Because the magician looks up, many viewers are led to believe that he threw the ball off screen. In fact, he palms the ball. In a second video, he looks at his hand instead of up in the air.
In both cases, some people who saw the video…
dmunger | November 20, 2006The flash-lag effect is difficult to explain, but amazingly cool to see. Over at Mixing Memory, Chris has a great post where he links to two examples of the phenomenon and discusses what might be causing it. Cool, isn't it?
I can't resist linking to one more example, created by none other than CogDaily's own Greta Munger. Here are her instructions for seeing the illusion: "Take a look at the movie below, and decide whether or not the blue flashed object is exactly aligned with the end of the gray rod. To start the movie, click on the rod." Greta discusses the illusion further in this post.…
dmunger | November 16, 2006The APA has an important rule that all authors of APA-sponsored journal articles must agree to before publication:
After research results are published, psychologists do not withhold the data on which
their conclusions are based from other competent professionals who seek to verify the
substantive claims through reanalysis and who intend to use such data only for that
purpose, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and
unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release.
The rule seems quite straightforward. But when data is requested, how…
dmunger | November 15, 2006I'm actually doing better than usual: I'm just a day behind on the latest entertainment news. Last night, CBS premiered a TV show called 3 Lbs., which focuses on the tensions in a world-class neurosurgery unit of a major hospital. Most promising aspect of the show: it stars Stanley Tucci. If you missed it, you can catch the entire first episode on the show's web site. I haven't watched it yet, but if I have a free 40 minutes later in the day, I'll post an update with my thoughts about the show.
If you're not ready to commit that sort of time to the show just yet, you might watch this CBS…
dmunger | November 14, 2006Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink -- and the real research it was based on -- made quite a splash when it was unveiled: the idea that a teacher evaluation made in just 30 seconds could actually reliably predict teacher performance over an entire semester was certainly surprising.
The Charlotte Observer has an excellent article about how the methods pioneered by Ambady and Rosenthal are being applied in real high school classrooms. Rather than 30 seconds, principals take 3 minutes to assess each teacher's performance, to catch problems early and intervene before they adversely affect the classroom…
dmunger | November 13, 2006There's an interesting site up which claims to be able to test whether or not you are tone deaf (the technical term for this condition is amusia). Though I'm not a music expert, I took the test, and in my opinion it really was testing my ability to determine the difference between similar musical phrases, so I'd highly recommend it.
Test your musical skills in 6 minutes
The only problem with the site is that it doesn't offer any way to compare your results with those of others who've taken the test. To rectify that situation, I've added a poll below. We'll at least have an idea of how…
dmunger | November 10, 2006If you're like me, sometimes you feel as if you couldn't get anything done at all if it weren't for coffee. I'm sipping from a cup right now as I write this (a double Americano, in case you're curious). Caffeine seems to perk me up just enough to organize my thoughts into a coherent whole.
But Hugo at AlphaPsy points out that caffeine's effects aren't all good. If you give a spider a large dose, her web will be a random mess instead of a beautiful spiral. Even more fascinating are the human responses to arguments while under the influence of caffeine:
In these experiments, people were made…
dmunger | November 9, 2006Babel's Dawn is providing coverage of the Cradle of Language conference in South Africa. Several presenters at the conference are challenging the idea that language arose from a single genetic mutation. Given the complexity of human language, such a finding would certainly be a surprise to me.
It's tempting to argue that since there appears to be a "universal grammar" -- that all modern languages share some basic similarities -- they must have stemmed from the same genetic mutation. The evidence doesn't appear to be in the single-mutation advocates' favor:
In an afternoon session, Bernard…