Research

We want your opinion! This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey (from ScienceBlogs.com) are completing an academic manuscript on the impact of science blogging and this survey will provide invaluable data to answer the following questions: Who reads or writes blogs? What are the perceptions of blogging, and what are the views of those who read blogs? How do academics and others perceive science blogging? What, if any, influence does science blogging have on…
In 1999, Melissa Kamins and Carol Dweck made a striking discovery about the best way to praise children. When you are helping a child learn to read, saying "you are a smart girl" as opposed to "you did a good job reading" results in very different behavior when she has trouble reading in the future. Children who have received praise about their abilities ("you're smart") rather than specific praise about a task ("you did a good job ___") are more likely to exhibit "helpless" behavior when they encounter problems. Even though they were praised in both cases, telling kids they are "smart" just…
A recent report in Nature Neuroscience has gotten a lot of press. The headlines proclaim that "left-wing" brains are different from "right wing" brains. Are our brains literally hard-wired to be conservative or liberal? The article in the L.A. Times sure seems to suggest it: Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict. Really?…
See, this kind of shit makes me crazy. There's a press release floating around about another study that demonstrates that women and men are, well, you know. The way they are. It should be noted that this report will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (appropriately, PNAS), and is made of SCIENCE, so it's definitely true. The study reports differentials in the importance of a potential date's physical attractiveness among male and female speed daters--I mean, among the general population. In their sampling--according to the press release--men went for the most…
What is "significant" research? In most psychology journals, "significant" results are those measuring up to a difficult-to-understand statistical standard called a null-hypothesis significance test. This test, which seems embedded and timeless, actually has its origins in theoretical arguments less than a century old. Today's gold standard of statistical significance is the p value, described by Ronald Fisher less than 50 years ago. Many people, even many active researchers, don't understand much about the p value other than when it's less than .05, the research is usually considered…
width="70" height="85" /> Countless change blindness studies have showed that we're extremely bad at noticing when a scene has changed. We fail to notice objects moving, disappearing, or changing color, seemingly right before our eyes. But sometimes we do notice the change. What sorts of changes are we more likely to notice? I've created a simple demo that may (or may not) help answer that question. Take a look at this movie (QuickTime required). It will show a scene for six seconds. Then it will briefly flash white, and the same scene will be shown for another six seconds. Can you spot…
Note: This article was originally posted on November 14, 2006 If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a…
tags: researchblogging.org, bipolar disorder, manic-depressive illness, mental health, research Those of you who suffer from bipolar disorder, as I do, will be pleased to learn that some novel treatments are being developed for this illness, thanks to research combined with careful observations. Bipolar disorder is also known as manic-depressive illness. It is a mood disorder where a person who suffers from it experiences tremendous emotional shifts, from crushing depressions to intense mania and back again. These mood swings often are independent from what is happening in the person's…
As I noted last evening, the world of beer and spirits is mourning the loss of British writer and libation enthusiast, Michael Jackson. Jackson was suffering from Parkinson's disease but succumbed to a heart attack earlier this week at age 65. Jackson's Beer Hunter website/blog notes that a national toast to Jackson will be held on 30 September, with all proceeds to benefit the US National Parkinson Foundation. Stan Hieronymus writes: If you know a brewpub, bar, tavern, ale house, tap house, multi-tap or similar establishment that might participate urge them to do so. Information will be…
Nick Anthis at The Scientific Activist had a great post yesterday on the fallacies in an article from the UK Guardian detailing a peer-reviewed publication on replacing animal research with in vitro and computational models. As much as all scientists would wish this were true, there are simply no replacements for animal research in many areas, as noted by PZ Myers. One of my favorite sources for promoting the factual necessity for animal research (and exposing extremist groups for attacks on scientists) is the Washington, DC-based, Foundation for Biomedical Research. The poster above is…
We can recognize the faces of our friends very quickly from just a snapshot. Within 150 milliseconds of being flashed a photo, brain signals respond differently to photos containing animals than photos with no animals. We can categorize scenes as "beach," "forest," or "city" when they are flashed for even shorter periods. But we also get a great deal of information from the motion of people and animals. We can identify our friends and family members just from a point-light display of them walking. We can also detect the emotions of point-light faces, and even the species of point-light…
Memory is a curious thing, and visual memory is even more curious. In some ways, we don't remember much about the scene that's right in front of us. As countless change blindness studies have shown, we often don't notice even obvious changes taking place in a scene. Other studies have concluded that visual short term memory has a capacity of just three or four objects. Yet I have vivid visual memories of scenes I have only glimpsed for a few seconds: A deer below the rim of the Grand Canyon; Michael Jordan draining a three-pointer to win the NBA championships; the standing ovation our…
When you look at a scene: a building, a park, a mountain, your visual system processes the information differently from when you look at a single object: a face, a pen, or a coffee mug. For example, this first image is from our trip to Prague this past summer: When you look at this picture, your eye might move first to the bridge, then to the lampposts on the bridge, to the castle in the background, to the overhanging limbs. The next picture is much simpler: It's a coffee mug, plain and simple. There's not much left to do with it. There are three regions of the brain that respond more…
Take a look at the following two circles. At the center, they're both the identical bright white. But which one seems brighter? Let's make this a poll: I'm not sure if this illusion will work when respondents know the objects are the same brightness, but naive viewers will reliably rate the circle on the left as brighter -- this is called the "glare effect," and it occurs whenever there's a gradual gradient around a circle or other shapes (the gradient must approach the color of the shape as it gets closer to the shape itself). I found the illusion so powerful that I had to close the…
On our recent trip to Europe, we had a hard time getting the kids to smile for pictures. Most of our pictures of Nora ended up looking something like this (actually this one's a self portrait, but you get the idea): Here her expression is basically neutral, and if it wasn't such a dramatic shot, it would be a bit boring. When we could get her to smile, often the smile was inauthentic -- posed, or even sarcastic, like in this shot: Here she's expressing mock excitement over her parents' excitement about the figure depicted in the statue: Leonardo Fibonacci, the great mathematician (click…
When you have a conversation with someone, you're doing a lot more than just interpreting the meaning of the words they say. You're also trying to figure out what they intend to say and integrating that in to your understanding. You're working together with them to decide whose turn it is to speak. Your accents become similar. Your body movements become synchronized. You even scratch your nose at the same time as your conversational partner. It makes sense, then, if you're both looking looking at the same picture while you talk, that you'll look at the same parts of the picture at the same…
One of the amazing things the visual system does is to compensate for the motion of our bodies. Consider, for example, the difference between the apparently smooth view of the world you get when you're talking a walk, and the shaky image you see if you record the same walk while holding a camcorder. Compensating for the motion of your body is a complex process, but it seems to occur almost automatically. Similarly, if you quickly dart your eyes from one object to another, or even several objects in succession, the motion is seamless, while a videocamera recording the same motion would be…
...just kidding! It's nearly every month that a new study comes out showing that abstinence only programs don't do shit. This time a study from Oxford shows, through a meta-analysis of 13 different U.S. trials, that none of the abstinence-only programmes had an impact on the age at which individuals lost their virginity, whether they had unprotected sex, the number of sexual partners, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases or the number of pregnancies. One trial did show a short-term benefit with participants reporting that they were less likely to have had sex in the month following…
Like most parents, Greta and I were very excited about having our first baby (Greta, I imagine, might be somewhat less enthusiastic about me putting this vintage photo of her online...). We weren't naive, though -- we had heard from friends and family about the sleepless nights, the juggling of jobs and child care, the constant requirements for feeding, and the endless stacks of diapers. We knew it wouldn't be an easy task, but we felt we were up to it, and we were overjoyed to be having a child. But at what point does this optimism become a burden? If you're unrealistically hopeful about the…
Take a look at this movie (QuickTime Required): The moving object is exactly the same in each picture, but the background is different. If you're like most people, you'll see one object as an ice skater, and the other as a spinning top. This puts the objects in two different classes -- animate (something that can move by itself: a human, animal, robot, and so on) and inanimate (something that requires an external force to move). Do we perceive the two objects differently? Arguably, it's important that we do: if an object can move by itself, it's much more likely to be a threat to us than…