Research
dmunger | March 4, 2009 What's your first reaction on seeing this picture of Nora? Are you excited because she appears to be excited? Or do you react to her intent? Perhaps you think she's cute, or maybe even sarcastic. Ultimately you might have all of those reactions.
There's no doubt we're exceptionally fast at responding to faces, and to the emotions they convey. But reacting appropriately, especially when a face signals danger, could be the difference between life and death.
These two ways of reacting to a facial expression correspond to two possible intentions of an expression: to elicit an emotion in someone…
dmunger | March 2, 2009When I'm writing a post for Cognitive Daily (or doing almost any kind of writing, for that matter), I try to keep outside distractions to an absolute minimum. I even have an application on my computer that shuts off all access to the internet for a specified period of time. I find most music distracting, but sometimes I'll play a Mozart piano concerto, which seems to help focus my attention (see here for a possible explanation).
Some people, however, seem to be able to be incredibly productive despite a huge number of distractions -- Twitter status updates, email, crying babies, you name it.…
terrasig | February 27, 2009I've been scarce around these parts and hope to get a Friday Fermentable up before midnight. However, I just wanted to share the following on the last couple of days discussions about Nature Publishing Group's various pronouncements on the importance of science blogging, especially their mention in Nature Methods of ScienceOnline'09, an unconference I co-organized this year with founders and online science visionaries, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker.
Bora has the main stories and DrugMonkey adds commentary and his own personal experiences.
But leave it to Anton Zuiker to capture the whole…
dmunger | February 26, 2009Last week, we presented research by Miranda Scolari's team about visual expertise and visual short-term memory. Their conclusion: "experts" don't have a larger visual memory capacity than non-experts, they just have the ability to process more details. Scolari's team was working under the assumption that all humans (or at least all the students in their experiment) are face-recognition experts.
It's true: we're amazingly good at recognizing faces we've seen before. Think how much easier it is to remember a face you've seen than it is to remember the name that goes with the face. But surely we…
sb admin | February 25, 2009I'm supervising a few independent studies this year, with groups of students working on fairly large and fairly fuzzily-defined design projects. These groups couldn't be more different from each other in terms of the way they act as a group, act as individuals, and interact with me. It's got me thinking a lot lately about group dynamics among students and the strong influences that certain individuals have over the behavior of the entire group.
One of the groups is highly functional---on the surface. The students all get along really well with each other and appear to complement each other…
dmunger | February 25, 2009What is so mesmerizing about pointillist paintings like Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte? At first, we're impressed by the technical virtuosity of the work. It's an immense painting that Greta and I visited many times when we were in college in Chicago (and now, whenever we return for a visit):
As you can see even in this reduced image, the painting is composed of tiny dots. But what you may not notice is that the dots in a given region of the painting aren't all the same color. Take a look at this detail:
The leaves in the trees range from red to yellow to green to blue, and…
dmunger | February 23, 2009One of my most vivid memories from middle school was in English class. The class wasn't paying attention to the teacher -- we were chattering during "work time" and she wanted us to stop and return to a full-class lesson. So she shouted "SEX!" We all shut up immediately and stared at her in disbelief. Then she said, in a calm, normal voice: "Now that I've got your attention ..." and proceeded with her lesson. It worked great -- except for one thing. I have no recollection of what she actually taught us that day.
This brings up an interesting point: Teachers are often tempted to bring up…
dmunger | February 18, 2009Take a look at this quick video. You'll see a set of six small images, arranged in a circle, for 1 second. Then the screen will go blank for 1 second. Finally, one image will reappear in the place of one of the first six pictures. Your job: indicate whether the final image is the same or different as the image that originally appeared in that same spot.
Click here to view the movie (QuickTime required)
In principle, this should be an easy task, right? Your visual working memory can hold around six items at a time, so it shouldn't be hard at all to remember if the new picture is the same as…
sb admin | February 12, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
My sciblings at Scienceblogs have done a pretty thorough fisking of the Andrew Wakefield affair.To recap breifly, a paper by Wakefield and others in The Lancet in 1998 raised an alarm that the widely used measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine was the cause of some cases of childhood autism and a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. The incriminated agent was alleged to be measles virus contained in the vaccine (MMR has never contained mercury preservative). The impact was dramatic and this issue became a powerful engine propelling the anti-vaccine…
dmunger | February 11, 2009How do you decide how dangerous a sex-offender is? Certainly all cases of sexual assault are appalling, but clearly some incidents are worse than others. In some places, teenagers who photograph themselves naked and send the pictures to their friends can be prosecuted as purveyors of child-pornography. While we may want to intervene in these cases, surely the action shouldn't be as drastic as when we're dealing with an adult who's a serial child rapist.
There are miles of gray area between these two extremes, and psychologists are often called on to make the tough judgment of how dangerous a…
dmunger | February 9, 2009One of stand-up comic George Carlin's most famous routines was the seven words you can't say on TV (obviously, not safe for work). He repeated the words over and over, and it was hilarious -- especially back in the days before most people had cable. These days we've become desensitized to those words, and it's hardly surprising any more to see them laced into casual conversation.
Or is it?
One test of our ability to ignore words is rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP. In RSVP, you're shown a rapid sequence of words or images -- one about every tenth of a second. Your job is to pick out…
dmunger | February 5, 2009Have you seen this "illusion" before?
The arrangement of the pacman shapes leads you to perceive rectangles, which are actually just empty spaces between the pacmen (that's a technical term -- it's in a journal article, so it must science!). Technically the rectangles are called "Kanizsa-type subjective contours," because while we perceive rectangles, there aren't actually rectangles there. It's a powerful effect, and once you see the shapes, it's difficult to look at the picture without perceiving them. Here's the identical figure with the pacmen rotated in random directions:
See? No…
dmunger | February 3, 2009You may have heard of the Stroop effect, and you may have even seen it demonstrated. But can the Stroop effect itself be manipulated? This short demo may show that it can.
In case you're not familiar with the effect, it occurs when you try to say the color a word is printed in, while the word itself names a color (so if you see "RED" you should say "green.") Try it with these short lists. Remember, say the color the word is PRINTED in, not the color named by the word.
Which column was most difficult? Let's make this a poll:
Which column was the most difficult? ( surveys)
The basic…
dmunger | January 29, 2009Some of the things psychologists ask their research subjects to do are really rather annoying. I'm not talking about Milgram-esque studies where people confront their inner demons, I'm talking about much more pedestrian stuff. This movie, for example, gives you a small taste of the Sustained Attention to Response Test (SART). A series of numbers will flash by, about 1 per second. While you watch, tap your finger on your desk for each number except the number 4. Give it a whirl:
In some ways, it's a completely mindless task, but you have to keep paying attention or you'll end up tapping when…
dmunger | January 28, 2009Take a look at this graph showing population distribution by county in a fictional U.S. state:
How do you read such a graph? Is this the ideal way to depict this sort of information? If you wanted to know which part of the state was most populous, how would you go about figuring it out? Researchers have developed conflicting models to explain how it's done. One model suggests that people reading this kind of graph must cycle between the different parts in order to understand it. This makes some sense: to answer our question about population, you'd have to look back and forth between the…
dmunger | January 26, 2009Two years ago, we linked to a post about an ABC news program that claimed to have replicated Stanley Milgram's controversial experiments from the 1960s and 70s about obedience to authority. The original study tricked unwitting paid study participants into believing that they had administered potentially deadly shocks at the bidding of an experimenter. The cover was a "learning and memory experiment," allegedly designed to see if administering shocks would improve people's ability to memorize a list of words.
The shocks progressively escalated from 15 volts ("Slight Shock") to 450 volts ("…
awild | January 25, 2009
Figure 1. For the 32 most-studied ant species, the percentage of publications 1984-2008 in various contexts.
In thinking about where the myrmecological community ought to devote resources in the age of genomics, it occcured to me that putting some numbers on where researchers have previously concentrated their efforts might be useful. So I went to BIOSIS previews and quantified the number of publications in 5-year intervals from 1984 to 2008 recovered under searches for various well-studied ant species (methods and full data here). Here's what I found:
Number of publications 1984-2008…
dmunger | January 22, 2009What are we looking at when we recognize faces? The shapes of of the individual components of the face -- eyes, nose, mouth? Or are we recognizing the larger patterns of how those parts relate to one another -- the distance between the eyes, the position of the mouth relative to the nose? We're actually probably doing some of each, with those configural patterns playing a slightly more important role.
But this raises an important question for perception researchers, because recognizing details and recognizing overall patterns utilize two different components of the visual system. Researchers…
dmunger | January 21, 2009There's lots of evidence that most TV isn't beneficial to toddlers, and it may even be harmful. But can't kids learn from TV too? Isn't that supposed to be what shows like Teletubbies, Barney, and Sesame street are all about? For older children, three and above, it does seem to be true that some learning can occur, but for two-year-olds and younger, the evidence tells a different story.
Few studies have shown any evidence that two-year-olds can learn from TV anywhere near as well as they learn from real-world experiences. While they clearly can distinguish between nonsense programming and…
dmunger | January 15, 2009In 2007 I received a really cool Christmas present that I still haven't used. It's a kit to help identify the various components of the aroma in a glass of wine. I haven't used it because I wanted to wait for the right occasion -- say, a party with some of my wine-loving friends. But I've also been secretly skeptical whether it would really help. The kit has tiny vials that are supposed to represent individual aromas: "oak," "hazelnut," "coffee," "cherry," and so on. What does identifying an aroma have to do with deciding whether you like a glass of wine?
As it turns out, more than you might…