Research
dmunger | July 25, 2007Imagine you're taking a test--just for fun--to see how fast you can add numbers and alphabetize letters. Would it help you complete the test faster if you had a warning before each item indicating whether you'd be adding or alphabetizing?
Now imagine you're taking the same test--only this time the test will be used to determine whether you qualify for a promotion at work. In this, more stressful situation, do you think the warnings would help? Would you change your strategy on the test?
There is considerable evidence that cognitive performance changes when we are under stress. For example,…
dmunger | July 19, 2007[originally posted January 26, 2006]
Kids in America grow up in a society that overwhelmingly believes in life after death. At the same time, these same kids grow up learning more and more about the nature of living organisms, and what makes something living or dead. At some point, these two belief systems inevitably collide: pure religious faith suggests that the soul lives on after death, but pure science suggests that consciousness can only exist in a living brain.
Assuming these kids don't read Pharyngula (in which case all hope of an eternal soul would likely be quickly and rudely…
cogdaily | July 16, 2007This is a guest post by Laura Younger, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
Take a look at these static images from a video clip.
Can you tell what the person is doing? It might be hard to make it out from these still pictures, but when you see the same thing in motion it becomes quite clear. Visit the Biomotion Lab and you'll quickly understand.
What you see is called a point-light display. Lights are attached to joints on the body and filmed while a person is performing an action. The animated display makes it surprisingly clear that this person is walking. But, could a…
cogdaily | July 12, 2007This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers from Spring of 2007.
Does anything seem stick out about this sentence? I'm sure that if I told you to keep looking for yellow highlighted words, you would not have much trouble finding them in these first few sentences. You could even make it simpler for yourself and just look for any highlighted word. The only highlighted portions are yellow, so what is the difference? Let's say that by now you are used to searching for these highlighted words by just looking for a different color background than just the usual white…
cogdaily | July 9, 2007This is a guest post by Christy Tucker, one of Greta's top student writers from Spring of 2007.
Take a look at the following paintings. How alike are they? How can you tell--which clues help you determine similarity? Now, which of these girls are related? If only two of these young girls are related, how would you determine which two? Would they be the same ones that you thought looked very similar?
Laurence Maloney and Maria Dal Martello studied observer's ratings of the similarity between two children's faces in relation to judgments on whether the two are siblings. Do we simply note…
dmunger | July 5, 2007A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings:
[originally posted on May 9, 2006]
The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you can:
If English is your native language, you should be much quicker at naming the colors of the first list than the second list. Why? Even though the task is to identify the colors,…
cogdaily | July 2, 2007This is a guest post by Jonathan Leathers, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
Take a look at this word:
MONDAY
What color do you see? Red? Blue?
While you may see nothing unusual, some people report being able to perceive colors associated with different days of the week when they are written down or heard in conversation. This ability is attributed to a phenomenon known as synesthesia, previously thought to be extremely rare. In synesthesia, the human brain interprets one set of sensory stimuli in terms of another; in other words, two senses cross. But synesthesia goes…
cogdaily | June 29, 2007This is a guest post by Martina Mustroph, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Rats are often useful models for understanding human behavior,. Testing drugs on rats before testing them on humans is particularly enticing because it is relatively free of ethical concerns (relative to drugging humans, at least), and the amount of drug required to achieve an effect is relatively small compared to the amount it would take to see an effect in a human. As rats' nervous systems are very similar to the human nervous system, they lend themselves really well to drug studies. Rats have been…
cogdaily | June 25, 2007This is a guest post by Rivka Ihejirika, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Do you find it harder to recognize the face of someone from a race other than your own? Does it take you longer to recall the face of someone from an unfamiliar race? Some researchers believe that we are born with a predisposition to process faces of those from our own race better than faces from other races. Other researchers believe that the own-race face bias is not innate, but we develop a preference for the race of those in our immediate environment. People of all ages demonstrate the bias to…
cogdaily | June 21, 2007This is a guest post by Laura Younger, one of Greta's top student writers from Spring 2007
Everyone has heard of the concept of reinforcement. You reinforce your child with dessert after finishing his or her vegetables; you praise your dog with ear scratches for not barking at the mailman; or you give yourself a little TV time for cleaning the bathroom. It's a system that often works, but what types of behaviors can be reinforced? We know that learning can be improved with reinforcement, but is external reinforcement required for learning to occur? A team of researchers led by Aaron Seitz…
cogdaily | June 18, 2007This is a guest post by David Kerns, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
As movie special effects technology improves, more and more live-action shots are being replaced with computer animation. Harry Potter flies across the Quidditch field; Spider-Man swings from web to web through the cityscape of New York City, and miniaturized Hobbits fight the overpowering Orcs of Middle-earth. All of these are examples of human movements that have been reconstructed with computer animation. But sometimes this type of animation fails to come across as real. When Harry falls from his…
cogdaily | June 15, 2007This is a guest post by Martina Mustroph, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007.
When you're typing, your senses of touch, hearing, and sight align. You feel, see, and hear your fingers touch the keyboard. Now imagine that you are outdoors and you feel a drop of water hit your hand. If you are like me, then it probably immediately occurs to you that it was a raindrop, so you stretch out your hand to see if more will come, and you look up at the sky for menacing clouds. Let's say the sky is blue and clear as far as you can see. Now your senses of touch and sight are at odds: your…
cogdaily | June 11, 2007This is a guest post by Suzie Eckl, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Forget color television.
Before we had color, we had black and white. Before we had movies, we had photographs. And before photographs we had...
Engravings?
Prior to August 19, 1839, the date Daguerre and Niepce revealed that they had created the world's first photograph, artists had all the control in reproducing the world as they saw it. Many artists chose not painting or sculpture but engraving. They carved their images into wood or burned them into metal.
In a fascinating analysis, Danielle Zavagno…
cogdaily | June 7, 2007This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
How well do you think you can navigate through these woods?
How about when your field of view is significantly reduced?
When external information such as sight is decreased, our ability to make our way to a goal while avoiding obstacles will understandably be impaired.But when we lose all visual information we can still make mental representations, or "mental maps" of our surroundings. Even blind individuals compare with those who can see in tasks such as recreating large scale representations of…
cogdaily | June 5, 2007This is a guest post by Aaron Couch, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
When looking out a window, or watching a movie in a theater, the image you see is typically presented as right-side-up. Let's say though, that you're lying on your side in bed and looking out a window at your backyard. Both your internal gravity sense organs and the orientation of scenery (trees, buildings) tell you that you're actually seeing a "tilted" image, and your mind immediately tells you which part of the scene is "up".
In a similar vein, a team led by Ian P. Howard performed research that…
dmunger | May 23, 2007The visual system is very good at noticing a new object coming into view. However, the system isn't perfect. If a second object appears near the first one, it takes a little longer to spot it. This phenomenon, known as inhibition of return, has been well-documented. We discussed it in a 2005 post:
If an object appears in one part of our field of view, it temporarily delays our ability to detect another object appearing near it. The effect begins about a third of a second after the first object appears and lasts about a second. If the second object appears sooner than that, we actually notice…
omnibrain | May 17, 2007A great abstract I found via improbable research blog:
How to write consistently boring scientific literature
Kaj Sand-Jensen (ksandjensen@bi.ku.dk), Freshwater Biological Laboratory, Univ. of Copenhagen, Helsingørsgade 51, DK-3400 Hillerød, Denmark.
Abstract
Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to…
dmunger | May 15, 2007When Greta earned her Ph.D. 13 years ago, Jim was two and a half years old, and Nora was just 10 months old. Jim knew a few words, and Nora couldn't talk at all. You might think a baby as young as Nora wouldn't have an appreciation for music or dance. If you can't walk, what good is dancing?
But babies -- and Nora was no exception -- love to be bounced. Bouncing her on your knee would elicit peals of laughter. Is this love of rhythmic bouncing somehow related to an appreciation of music?
Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel Trainor developed an ingenious study to see if babies even younger than…
dmunger | May 9, 2007"I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently that certainly there must be a grain of truth to it. Yet it certainly isn't the case that car drivers can't see such obstacles -- after all, they can see traffic signals that are much smaller than a bike or a motorcycle.
What they mean to say is that their attention was otherwise engaged -- perhaps by a phone conversation, perhaps by other traffic, or perhaps because…
dmunger | May 8, 2007Take a look at these two pictures. Who is more dangerous?
It's not hard to decide, although I wouldn't hurt a fly, and Nora, even at age three, could be brutal with her sarcasm. Now, what's the most dangerous situation?
Again, an easy decision. While Carhenge is certainly an awe-inspiring monument (and perhaps Jim could scratch himself on one of those cars), Nora's descent of this rock spire gives me shivers.
You might think that there aren't many differences in how adults judge threats in examples such as this, but there is some reason to believe that older adults may have a different…