Research
jane | June 2, 2008The theme of this month's Scientiae carnival is "Added Weight: Taking up Space." This theme is very timely for me, since I've been thinking about this topic lately---a lot. And, readers of the old blog may remember that my "theme" for the year is FEARLESS. Well, you can't really be fearless if you're trying to be invisible, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to take stock of what I'm doing this year to be true to the theme and, thus, to take up space in the world.
1. I am more direct in the way I communicate with people, particularly colleagues, but students as well. If there'…
dmunger | June 2, 2008The link below will take you to a short movie (QuickTime Required). You'll see a series of seven easy addition problems, which will flash by at the rate of one every two seconds. Your job is to solve the problems as quickly as possible (ideally, you should say the answers out loud).
Click to watch movie
Apart from the possibility that you might have a better memory for some math facts than others, were any of the problems easier for you?
If you're like most people, you probably responded faster when a problem was repeated, as was the case with 3 + 5. And since the order of operations doesn't…
dmunger | May 29, 2008Inspired by this post, we've decided to devote a week to the analysis of studies from the history of psychology.
Gestalt theory hit the psychology world by storm in the 1920s, and the Gestalt school's unquestioned leader (though probably not the originator of the concept) was Max Wertheimer. While many people have an intuitive understanding of the concept of "gestalt" as the essence or overall meaning of something, they may not be as aware of the Gestalt school's principles, which were laid down by Wertheimer and others in very specific and concrete ways.
What Wertheimer was reacting to was…
dmunger | May 28, 2008Inspired by this post, we've decided to devote a week to the analysis of studies from the history of psychology.
Today we consider the work of Millicent Washburn Shinn, one of the first women admitted to the University of California, Berkeley (in 1874), and the first to earn a Ph.D. there. In 1890, her niece Ruth was born, and Shinn spent hours carefully observing the child's every behavior. This "large mass of data" became the basis for a book that was welcomed by the scholars of the day, The Biography of a Baby, which, while not the first of its kind, certainly was one of the most thorough…
dmunger | May 27, 2008Inspired by this post, we've decided to devote a week to the analysis of studies from the history of psychology.
Today's post discusses a small fraction of the work done by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in the study of memory. Ebbinghaus spent two excruciating year-long periods (1879-80 and 1883-84) painstakingly studying the limits of human memory, using just one experimental participant -- himself.
Ebbinghaus recognized early on that memories were inextricably bound up in their content. It's a very different thing to memorize a poem and an essay, even if the two are the identical length.…
esiegel | May 23, 2008We need one of those propaganda videos, like the Marines had when I was a kid:
Seriously, I remember watching that and actually thinking it would be awesome to be a Marine! (And for those of you who don't know me that well, I loathe armed conflict.)
Well, I'm a scientist. Can't we do anything cool to attract people to be interested in it, or help support it? Baby steps, folks, baby steps. And Duncan Forbes at Swinburne in Australia (where I almost moved when I was offered a position with them last February) has composed a how-to guide entitled:
So You Want To Be A Professional Astronomer!
It…
dmunger | May 20, 2008How do you raise "good kids"? It's one of the questions that plagues parents even before their kids are born. Although everyone's child can't be above average, we all want our kids to be nice to others, to "get along" in the world. But kids don't necessarily cooperate. Babies scream, pull hair, defecate and urinate where they're not supposed to. Toddlers throw fits in the middle of supermarkets, and older children lie to us and steal from each other. How do we keep them from becoming delinquents, convicts, or worse?
Unfortunately a lot of the research suggests that parents don't actually have…
jane | May 17, 2008My research straddles several subfields---let's call them X, Y, Q, and Z (because I'm not in the mood to come up with more descriptive terms). Z is really a minor related area, and Q is a peripherally related area, so my research basically falls into camps X and Y. Because of my particular training, and the lab I studied in in grad school, I have always identified myself as being an X researcher, primarily, whose work just happens to include Y.
This may be about to change.
It's been the case for a while now that sending my work out to conferences has been somewhat of a crap shoot. If I…
dmunger | May 15, 2008This morning I went into the darkest room in our house (the kids' bathroom), closed the door, and turned off the lights for 5 minutes. There was enough light coming in through the crack in the door that after a minute or two I could begin to make out shapes in the room: A towel rack, the shower curtain. My eyes had adapted to the dark condition. Then I closed my right eye and covered it with my hand. I turned the lights back on, for a minute, until my left eye had adapted to the light. Then I turned the lights off.
I could still see the towel rack and shower curtain with my right eye, which…
dmunger | May 13, 2008Jim was an early, confident walker. Greta likes to say that he didn't learn to walk, he went straight to running. By the time he was about 16 months old, he could already outrun his already-pregnant mother.
Nora, on the other hand, was a late, tentative walker. She took her first steps at around 12 months, and still wasn't very confident as a walker at 18 months. In this photo, at 17 months, she still clings to their toy kitchen set for balance.
But I've just finished reading a fascinating study suggesting that at 14 months, when both of them were walking -- Jim with confidence, and…
terrasig | May 13, 2008I'm not sure whether this story qualifies as alternative medicine or religion, or neither. I throw it out to you because I and other sci/med bloggers widely criticize the infiltration of so-called alternative medicine in our academic medical centers.
But here in today's Health Journal section of the Wall Street Journal, Melinda Beck tells us of the application of mindfulness, a practice derived from Buddhism, to overcoming binge-eating disorders. Sure, this may be considered alternative medicine but it's really an application of psychology under the auspices of integrative medicine:
In a…
dmunger | May 12, 2008We're pretty good at remembering objects in a complex scene. We can even remember those objects when we move to a different location. However, the research so far has found that memory for the original view is a little better than memory when we've moved to a different location. Much of that research, however, has focused on relatively complex movements: Viewers are asked to remember an array of objects viewed from one side of a room, then are transported to a different part of the room and asked to decide whether the objects are arranged in the same pattern (actually, they're sitting at a…
dmunger | May 8, 2008Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.
How much is Anton to blame for the accident? If you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe you'd give him a 7. After all, he was just trying to do something special for his parents.
But what if instead of hiding an anniversary present, Anton was rushing…
dmunger | May 7, 2008Ask almost anyone whether willfully deceiving another person -- lying -- is wrong, and they'll say it is. But probe a little deeper and most people will say there are some instances where lying is okay: lying to prevent a crime or an injustice is acceptable, just not lying for personal gain. Parents teach their kids that lying is wrong, and punish them for telling lies.
I can still remember the shock when my parents "lied" about my sixth birthday (which was a day away) at an ice-cream parlor so I could get a free sundae. But eventually, at some point, most American kids end up telling lies to…
dmunger | May 5, 2008If you've had a lot of musical training, you can probably tell the difference between a major and minor key. If you haven't had much training, even after having the difference explained to you, you're still not likely to be able to make that determination. Listen the following clip. It plays the same melody in a major and a minor key. Can you tell which is which?
But if the question is phrased differently, even non-musicians can reliably tell the difference: When listeners are told that some music (which happens to be in a major key) sounds "happy" and other music (in a minor key) sounds "…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2008tags: Elizabeth Blackburn, Joan Steitz, Albany Medical Center Prize
I learned this afternoon that America's highest prize in medicine, the Albany Medical Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, was awarded to two women for the first time in its history. The recipients, Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Joan Steitz of Yale University will share the $500,000 prize, which is second only to the $1.4 million Nobel Prize. The two medical scientists, who work independently of each other, study proteins associated with DNA and RNA, and their work will likely…
dmunger | May 1, 2008One of the amazing things about learning language is that children rarely hear language sounds in ideal acoustic environments. Maybe other people are talking in the background, or the dishwasher is running, or the TV is on. Yet somehow children they learn words just the same. By the time we're adults, we've become experts at filtering out irrelevant sounds and patching together meaning out of the cacophony of everyday life.
As one example, listen to this short clip of me saying the word "dinosaur" three times.
I edited the "s" sound out of the first "dinosaur," so you can clearly hear me…
dmunger | April 29, 2008Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa.
But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? Is learning to recognize other races as difficult as recognizing any new category…
dmunger | April 24, 2008Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even to torture animals. Over 85 percent of video games include violence.
When these statistics are combined with the results of studies showing that aggressive attitudes and even actions can be increased after playing violent games for as little as 20 minutes, it's possible that we have a major problem on our hands.
Another potential problem of video…
dmunger | April 22, 2008Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it's a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every "decision" we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual's control.
Yet others have argued that a belief in free will is essential to morality. If we don't actually have any control over the decisions we make, how can we be held accountable for them? Several studies have suggested that when kids believe their…