Research
dmunger | September 17, 2009Teens who routinely exercise (especially in organized activities like team sports) are less likely to smoke or abuse drugs or alcohol. This fact alone might make it seem like a no-brainer to include physical activities in substance-abuse prevention and treatment programs, but in fact little research has been done to figure out whether exercising actually causes people to be less interested in drugs and alcohol. It's also possible that potential substance-abusers are just uninterested in exercise, or that drug abuse causes a lack of interest in exercise. But because so little research has been…
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 | September 8, 2009Imagine a critical witness being grilled in preparation for a high-profile murder case. The prosecuting attorney wants to make sure she has every angle covered, so she questions the witness over and over to double- and triple-check that he has his story right. When he finally takes the stand, he remembers every detail she asked him about. But when the defense attorney cross-examines him, she takes an unexpected new tactic, asking about details the prosecutor hadn't prepared him for. He stumbles over some of the answers, contradicting other witnesses, and now all his testimony seems suspect.…
sb admin | September 8, 2009The New York Times editorial page draws attention to a new report that provides details about just how badly our system of workplace protections is failing workers in low-wage industries. Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in Americaâs Cities provides the results of extensive research by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project and the U.C.L.A. Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Researchers surveyed 4,387 front-line workers (i.e., excluding managers and professional and technical workers) in low-wage…
dmunger | September 3, 2009How did you decide to read this post? You might have seen the headline in an RSS reader or noticed it on the ScienceBlogs home page. Maybe someone emailed or tweeted the link to you. But you still had to make the decision to actually read it. How do you know when you made that decision?
In 1965 H.H. Kornhuber and L. Deeke found that brain activity precedes a conscious choice (voluntarily pressing a button) by 500 to 1,000 milliseconds. But in 1983 a team led by B. Libet found that when people were asked when they consciously decided to press a button, they said their decision came about 200…
dmunger | September 1, 2009Jim and Nora each attended summer camps that they enjoyed tremendously this past summer. When we picked up Nora from her camp, she was completely exhausted. Why? She and her new friends had only gotten 30 minutes of pretend sleep the night before. This was to fool their counselors before sneaking into a pre-determined room for a vigil during their precious last few hours together. Jim, it turned out, had stayed up all night his last night too, but without the pretense of tricking the counselors, who had by that time pretty much given up on enforcing a curfew.
Despite their exhaustion, we…
dmunger | August 27, 2009One of the most exciting moments of my junior-high-school career was stepping into my first-ever foreign-language classroom. While foreign language studies had a reputation for being tedious, I was nonetheless thrilled at the idea of being able to communicate with people from a different, seemingly more exotic part of the world. We were allowed to choose between French and Spanish, and I picked French because it seemed more "glamorous."
Excited as I was to learn a new language, I was still shocked to find out that every word was either "masculine" or "feminine." Livre, "book," was masculine…
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…
grrlscientist | August 20, 2009tags: How Proteins Are Made From DNA in a Living Cell, biology, molecular biology, DNA, streaming video
This video uses the latest research to create an animation of how DNA gives rise to proteins in a living cell. But do you think the word "machine" is correct? I have difficulty with the use of that word .. [4:27]
dmunger | August 18, 2009[This post was originally published in September, 2007]
Here's a task that four-year-olds can do but three-year-olds have some trouble with. Imagine Sally in the picture below is playing with a ball. She puts the ball in the box and goes to the kitchen to get a drink. While she's gone, Bill takes the ball out of the box and puts it in the bucket. When Sally returns, where does she look for the ball?
Most three-year-olds will say Sally would look in the bucket, apparently failing to realize that Sally doesn't know anything about what Bill did while she was gone. Some researchers have…
grrlscientist | August 17, 2009tags: How DNA is Replicated in a Living Cell, biology, molecular biology, DNA, streaming video
I still remember when I learned how DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) replication occurs, and it was like a lightning bolt from the sky: it changed my view of the world and a molecular biologist was born. This video uses the latest research to create an animation of how DNA is replicated in a living cell [1:54]
DNA replication is a fundamental process underlying biological inheritance that occurs in all living organisms to accurately copy their DNA. This process occurs through a "semiconservative"…
dmunger | August 13, 2009Take a look at these photos of Jim and Nora:
They've clearly been distorted (using the "spherize" filter in Photoshop), but in opposite directions. Jim's been "expanded" to make more spherical, while Nora has been "contracted" to look more concave. If you look at these photos for a while, you might have difficulty recognizing how Jim and Nora look normally.
This is an aftereffect. Aftereffects can be experienced in a number of ways, with dizziness being perhaps the most frequently observed -- spin around a few times with your eyes open and the room will appear to be spinning in the opposite…
dmunger | August 11, 2009Last year Nora and I went on a hike in the remote Pasayten Wilderness in northern Washington state. Parts of the hike were extremely grueling, while other parts were quite easy and fun. I made this short video to try to capture the differences:
The music was added as an afterthought, but in the end I think it's what makes the video so charming: without it, it would just be an ordinary walk in the woods. For each section of the trail, I chose a music clip that I thought expressed our feelings as we made our way along. Most people who watch the video agree: the music is totally appropriate to…
dmunger | August 6, 2009You may have noticed that Cognitive Daily hasn't exactly been living up to its name recently. During the summer vacation season, we travel quite a bit, so it's difficult to maintain our usual pace of posting. But along the way we've collected some great photos, and we'll try to share a few of them with you when it's relevant. For example, take a look at this picture I took in Maine about a week ago:
It's a lovely section of the Maine coast, readily identifiable by anyone as "shoreline." Earlier in the summer we vacationed with our nieces on the North Carolina coast, just a few hours' drive…
dmunger | July 29, 2009Implicit attitudes and associations can tell us a lot about a person. It's a way to find out if they might have a racial or gender bias, and recently there has even been some work suggesting that an implicit association test can tell us whether someone is lying -- it's called the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT). Here's how it works:
Suppose you're an American soldier and you want to know if an Afghan you've captured is really a member of the Taliban, despite his assurances that he supports your side and only carries a Kalashnikov for self-defense. You fire up the aIAT…
dmunger | July 28, 2009Take a look at this quick movie. What you'll see is two sets of three views of the same scene (our living room). For each group of three views, your job is to decide if the third view is taken from the same angle as one of the two previous views. After the first two views flash by, the text "Same?" will appear, and that's your cue to decide if the third view is the same as EITHER of the first two. Give it a shot:
Do you think you got the correct answer? Was either of the two sequences more difficult than the other?
The movie was inspired by a recent experiment led by Monica Castelhano.…
bcohen | July 28, 2009Not the best title for a post, and by best, I mean most accurate. If you'd like to get to the bottom of it, though, try this new dispatch over at McSweeney's: "The Elevator to Room 1028." It has elevators. It has intrigue. It has secrecy. It has stacks of books. And it has elevators.
This is part two of "Days at the Museum." Part I was noted here. It had a better picture.
sciencewoman | July 23, 2009Can you spare 50 minutes to help out a graduate student desperate for research participants? If so, please read below:
Dear all,
Within the context of my PhD project at Philips Research and Eindhoven University of Technology, I am developing a questionnaire that will help me to look at the relation between multimedia and feelings about the content. I would like to invite you to help me in validating this questionnaire.
The goal of this questionnaire is to gain further insight in the relation between multimedia and feelings, mostly with regard to how your feelings about the shown multimedia is…
dmunger | July 23, 2009[Originally posted in April 2007]
Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.
But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.
Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that…