Research
dmunger | January 14, 2009Can you tell if these two faces are the same or different?
How about these?
Or these?
If you're like most adults, it will be easier for you to identify different adult faces compared to the infant faces in the second example, and even the small children's faces in the third example.
This makes some sense, since most people don't spend much time around a wide variety of infants. Even a new parent typically only sees one or two infants at a time. The infants you see out in public are usually wrapped up and often are difficult to see. Most of us see more children than babies, but unless…
jane | January 13, 2009I've been in a situation this week where I've had to give my elevator pitch about my research quite a few times to quite a few people. Now, I have the standard spiel that I give, with various tweaks depending on how tech-savvy my audience is, that has evolved over time. But as I was repeating and repeating and repeating myself, I realized that it's time for an overhaul.
I'm not talking a complete overhaul---the fundamentals of what I do haven't changed. But my story is much different now. Or, at least the way I need to frame it is much different. Because I've had a lot of really good…
dmunger | January 12, 2009Take a look at this video made by fellow ScienceBlogger Dr. Isis. She's talking with her son, a toddler who adorably mimics her as she says very complicated words such as "Adventures in Ethics and Science" and "Wackaloon" (but sadly, not "Cognitive Daily"):
It's cute, but it's difficult to say whether Dr. Isis is really talking with her child. The difficulty babies have pronouncing words has led many parents to suspect they might be able to communicate better with their children using hand signs.
Last week we talked about a study suggesting that teaching babies even a few signs like those…
dmunger | January 8, 2009As a young child, my family was poor and we had to go to a public clinic for dental work. Since we were being seen by dental students, often the process was painful and took much longer than it should have. It was a tremendous relief when my uncle opened a swanky dental practice with a lake view, and soothing '70s rock wafted out over the audio system. I'm pretty sure my uncle was a better dentist than the students who had been seeing me before, but it also seemed like just the environment in his office contributed to me feeling better when he had to do an awful procedure like filling a…
dmunger | January 7, 2009Every year about this time, we start thinking about an exciting television event: the Super Bowl. I'm excited because it's the biggest football game of the year. The rest of the family just likes to watch the commercials. No doubt, some of those commercials are hilarious, and there's often more conversation about the commercials than the game itself. Companies spend millions buying advertising time, and millions more developing commercials that will stand out from the pack on Super Bowl Sunday. Other than watching your favorite team lose, there's nothing more disappointing than seeing an old…
sb admin | January 7, 2009What do the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the Migrant Clinicians Network, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, and 65 other organizations have in common? They've all endorsed the "Protecting Workers on the Job Agenda", a collaborative product of the American Public Health Association's Occupational Health and Safety Section and the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. The platform, released just in time for Labor Secretary-Designee Hilda Solis' confirmation hearing on Friday, outlines seven goals for improving our nationâs programs for preventing work-…
dmunger | January 5, 2009Baby sign language is all the rage these days. Upscale day-care centers and nanny services promote it as a better way of understanding what babies want. Babies have been known to reliably produce signs as young as 5.5 months, and studies have shown that they reliably produce signs significantly earlier than spoken words. As we've reported here, there is no evidence that teaching sign language delays spoken language development.
But is formal sign training effective? Some studies about baby sign language have been quite informal, with parents and caregivers inventing makeshift signs to "talk"…
jane | January 3, 2009For a few years now, rather than making new year's resolutions, I've been doing new year's themes. I've found it more rewarding to go with the theme idea, which is more like a principle for living one's life and guiding one's actions overall, rather than choosing specific behaviors on which to focus.
So, it's time to assess last year's theme and pick a new theme for 2009.
The theme for 2008 was FEARLESS:
When I look back on what really disappointed me about 2007, the thing that jumps out at me is that I often stand in my own way. .... In light of this introspection, the theme really named…
dmunger | December 30, 2008[This entry was originally posted in April 2007]
The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show you how it works. Just follow the directions on the opening screen:
Now, which letter did you see first? Let's make this a poll:
If we manage to replicate the effect, there should be a bias in the results, which I'll explain below so everyone has a chance to try it out before learning the "answer."
In the 1960s, Jacob Beck found that when…
dmunger | December 29, 2008[This article was originally posted in February, 2007]
The setting was an integrated suburban middle school: nearly evenly divided between black and white students. As is the case in many schools, white students outperformed black students both in grades and test scores. But how much of this difference is attributable to real differences in ability? After all, black kids grow up "knowing" that white kids do better in school. Perhaps this was just an example of kids living down to expectations.
At every performance level, this chart (adjusted for covariates) shows that black students who…
dmunger | December 18, 2008[This is our synchroblogging post in honor of PLoS ONE's second birthday. Why not write your own?]
Ever wonder whether it's better to study all night before a big exam, or to get a good night's sleep, but maybe not have a chance to go over all the material? We know that memory consolidation can occur in sleep, but we also know that those extra hours studying can do some good. And then there's the issue of false memories: who hasn't had the experience of being completely convinced their test answer is correct, only to learn that it's 100 percent wrong?
Inducing false memories is surprisingly…
dmunger | December 17, 2008Earlier today we asked readers to imagine an angry face. Then, in a surprise poll, we asked what gender the face was. So far our results match those of a study led by D. Vaughn Becker: over three-fourths of the responses were "male."
In the published study, there was no difference in the response based the respondent's gender. Both men and women are much more likely to think of a male "angry" face than a female one.
If we'd asked you to picture a happy face instead of an angry face, the results would switch almost as dramatically in the opposite direction: Most people say happy faces are…
dmunger | December 15, 2008When I was 12 years old, I sometimes got to ride the train from Seattle to my aunt's house in Portland. Staring at the countryside flashing past the train window, it seemed to me that the landscape was rotating in a giant circle: Nearby objects flashed past the train as expected -- they appeared to move the opposite way the train was going. But the mountains in the distance seemed to be moving forward, faster than the train. It was as if the land next to us was just a vast turntable, rotating rapidly as we stayed in the same place. This video (not my own) captures some of the effect:
I knew…
dmunger | December 11, 2008Yesterday's post showed that our memory for objects depends on the background information available when we first see the object: If you see a toy in a room, you remember it better later if you see it again in the room. Being in the same position in a blank picture of the room doesn't help.
So what about the scene is helping us remember the object? It could be things in the immediate area of the object: are we remembering the precise object/background relationship? In our example, maybe we're remembering exactly how the propeller and the gear interact with the background:
In 2003,…
jane | December 10, 2008No, really, I have been boring lately. No drama (well, unless you count the day one of my senior colleagues came into my office to announce that he had nothing to do....as I'm in the midst of slogging through my R&R and the other approximately 10 million things on my to-do list....I am really surprised that I didn't throttle him). No weird student stories (although I do have to say that this year, the grade-grubbers seem to be out in force. Does this have something to do with tenure? Does grade-grubbing increase the closer one gets to the tenure decision?). Just a lot of nose-to-the-…
dmunger | December 10, 2008Change blindness is a truly remarkable phenomenon. There are so many ways that the human perceptual system can be tricked into missing a change that appears right before our eyes, that it's sometimes astonishing that we aren't constantly running into walls or misplacing the basics of life -- our car keys, wallet, our what were were planning on eating for dinner. If you've never seen a demonstration of change-blindness, I'd suggest checking out some of the posts we've written about it before (For example, here, here, and here).
So why don't we notice these sorts of changes? This video, based…
dmunger | December 8, 2008What you remember about your life is almost certainly not accurate. Adults have very few memories before age five, and there is a systematic bias to the memories most people have for the rest of their lives. We are more likely to remember details about positive events like marriage and having children than we are to remember negative events like hospital stays or the death of a loved one.
Many studies have found that people appear to remember much more from their teens and 20s than the rest of their lives. A fifty-year-old might remember more about her 20s than her 30s, even though the events…
dmunger | December 4, 2008Can you hear colors? Can you see sounds? Do words have colors or images associated with them? It may sound impossible, but there are many documented cases of people who experience all these things. We've discussed it before on Cognitive Daily, and even found some limited evidence of similar phenomena among the general population. Collectively, these experiences are called synesthesia. Perceptions have many modalities corresponding to different ways of experiencing the world. The most well-known modalities are the five senses, but "words" or "numbers," or "colors" may also be considered…
jane | December 3, 2008
Prioritizing is good. Prioritizing is absolutely necessary in this job. But what do you do if you have time this month to do X projects, but X+1 projects are "high priority"? Is cloning legal yet?
Number of high priority projects = X+1 because a journal article I sent out for review before its time, which I thought would be a sure reject, just came back as a strong revise&resubmit. So that clearly needs to be fast-tracked. So yes, at least my plate is full for a totally awesome reason.
This is the first set of journal reviews that I've gotten back where there were no insulting/mean-…
dmunger | December 2, 2008We can quickly spot a face staring at us in a crowd. We can do this much quicker, for example, than we can determine that no one is staring at us, as this movie demonstrates. A grid of 100 pictures of Greta will be flashed for about 1/3 of a second. Can you spot the photos where she's looking at you? You'll see two different grids.
Most people are able to detect the staring faces much faster than those looking to the side. But we can also sometimes be fooled by faces, something we discussed on one of the first-ever CogDaily posts:
In this picture, the eyes for each face are exactly the…