Research
dmunger | May 3, 2007How many moving objects can you keep track of at once? Clicking on the image below will take you to Lana M. Trick's web site, where she has a nifty demo of a multi-object tracking task. You're asked to keep track one to four of the smiley-faces as they move randomly around the screen. Then when the faces stop moving, you click on the ones you were supposed to follow. Go ahead, give it a try!
You'll notice there are four levels of difficulty. Most adults can, with a little practice, track four out of ten randomly moving objects for ten seconds -- they fall apart when there are more than…
dmunger | May 1, 2007Kevin Granata, one of the authors of the work described here, was killed in in the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.
A back injury can destroy a person's life. The pain can be so excruciating that even "passive" activities like sitting up to read a book become intolerable. Whether you work in a steel mill or sit at a desk, a back injury can make it impossible for you to earn a living. Even worse, for many of those who suffer with chronic back injury, is that because it's difficult for others to see what's wrong, there's a tendency to not believe the problem is "real."
Yet there…
dmunger | April 26, 2007There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you would if you averted your gaze.
The problem arises when you address a group of people. How do you pick who to engage visually? Most public speakers are encouraged to look around the room, alternating eye contact with individuals in the audience. But there's no way to look at everyone at once -- so…
dmunger | April 24, 2007The 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 searching arrays of letters like this, viewers were…
dmunger | April 18, 2007One "trick" dieters often use is to put their food on a smaller plate. The idea is to fool yourself into thinking you're eating more food than you really are. But doesn't our stomach tell us how full we are?
Actually, it doesn't. Brian Wansink has devoted his career to studying how perception of food intake relates to actual eating behavior. Together with James Painter and Jill North, he's come up with a dramatic demonstration of how wrong our stomachs can be.
Volunteers were recruited to participate in a soup-only lunch in a room adjoining the school cafeteria. They filled out a form asking…
dmunger | April 12, 2007Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.
But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.
Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that training in the theater arts has…
dmunger | April 10, 2007Jim just started playing this year for his school's junior varsity lacrosse team. As a beginner, he doesn't see a lot of action, but it's nonetheless exciting to watch the games -- they are fast-paced, with plenty of scoring and a few hard hits. Most junior varsity teams don't have the equipment budget of a varsity team, so they don't have separate home and away uniforms like varsity teams do. This means game officials have a hard time remembering which team is which, so instead of referring to players as "home" or "away," they use the color of the uniforms to distinguish between teams.…
signout | April 9, 2007A couple of weeks ago, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that patients admitted to hospitals with heart attacks on weekends had higher mortality than similar patients admitted on weekdays. The investigators' analysis demonstrated that the main reason for this was a decreased rate of invasive intervention--namely, cardiac catheterization and angioplasty--on weekend admissions compared to weekday admissions.
This is perhaps not the surprise of the century: interventional cardiologists like their weekends off, just like normal people do. And although any hospital…
dmunger | April 5, 2007Even though most of us aren't concerned with physical survival on a day-to-day basis, the concept of "survival" remains a potent one -- just think of the persistent success of TV shows like Survivor and Lost. Perhaps this popularity has to do with more than just good advertising and an interesting plot twist. Perhaps it also has to do with the fundamental nature of survival itself.
Darwin's mechanism for evolution -- natural selection -- has often been reduced to the catch-phrase "survival of the fittest." There's more to it than that, of course, but if survival is such an important aspect of…
dmunger | April 3, 2007If you're like me, when you read a book, you form a picture of what's happening in your mind. I try to imagine not only what the characters look like, but also their surroundings. Eventually, I've created a picture of an entire world in my head. Then, when the book gets made into a film, I'm often disappointed when things don't look the way I imagined them. Could it be that the visual environment I've created in my head is just as appealing as the one created by the filmmaker?
It makes some sense: if we've gone to the trouble of creating a visual environment, why not use the part of our mind…
dmunger | March 29, 2007Earlier today I posted a poll challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite confident that they wouldn't succeed. Why was I so sure? Because in 2005, a team led by Sarah Belia conducted a study of hundreds of researchers who had published articles in top psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. Only a small portion of them could demonstrate accurate knowledge of how error bars relate to significance. If published researchers can't do it, should we expect…
dmunger | March 27, 2007When we see a familiar face, or even a photo of a favorite car or pet, we're often flooded with memories from our past. Sometimes just seeing a person or object that's similar to the ones in our memory will trigger recollections we never knew we had. Maybe you've had a memory triggered by a scent or the texture of an object. Sometimes emotions such as happiness or anger will spur vivid memories, too.
A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That's right: just holding your body in the right position means you'll have faster, more…
dmunger | March 22, 2007The Kuleshov Effect, discovered nearly a century ago by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, posits that the context in which we see an image of an actor's face will determine the emotion the face portrays. For example, take a look at this short little clip I made (QuickTime required). First you'll see a gray screen, then a photo, then a second gray screen, and another photo of a face, taken just after that person looked at the first photo:
What emotion would you say characterizes the second face? Is it neutral, subtly happy, or subtly sad?
Kuleshov's work suggests that most viewers will see that…
omnibrain | March 20, 2007It was one year ago today that I made the first post to Omni Brain. I never imagined we would do this well.
In the last year Omni Brain has undergone many many changes, the biggest of which have been Sandra of Neurofuture fame joining the blog, and moving to ScienceBlogs.
We started with not-even 3000 page views in our first full month and now receive tens of thousands of page views and visitors - which is pretty great for a smart ass little science blog! Our Technorati ranking has also grown by leaps and bounds; near 14,000 today.
Thanks everyone, for reading and for all your lively…
dmunger | March 20, 2007On the opening episode of the Colbert Report, faux conservative Stephen Colbert expressed his preference for "guts" over facts:
That's where truth comes from -- the gut. Facts come from the brain -- and some people think that makes facts better. But did you know you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your brain? You can look it up....
Anyone can tell the news to you. I'm going to feel the news at you.
In Colbert's signature parodic style, he appeals to the "common-sense" notion that "guts" matter more than "brains." Even his dubious claim about nerve endings has some merit --…
dmunger | March 15, 2007These two pictures represent the eye motions of two viewers as they scan a work of art with the goal of remembering it later. One of them is a trained artist, and the other is a trained psychologist. Can you tell which is which?
How about for this picture?
Art teachers have noted that when beginning students attempt to draw accurate portraits, they tend to exaggerate the size of key features: eyes and mouths are too big relative to the size of the head. Trained artists learn to ignore these temptations and draw the world as it really appears. Even world-famous artists such as Leonardo…
dmunger | March 13, 2007Take a look at the image below. Your job is to find the T among the sea of Ls. If you're like most people it will take just a second or two.
Figure 1:
If you repeat this task several dozen times, each time with a new set of Ls and T in different colors, positions, and orientations, you'll get quicker at the task. Try this one -- again, look for the T.
Figure 2:
But what if a pattern was repeated later on? Would you remember it? Would you be quicker? Take a look at this figure; again, look for the T:
Figure 3:
Here, the pattern of colors is the same as in Figure 1, and the T is in the same…
dmunger | March 8, 2007Two days ago, we discussed research suggesting that the emotional qualities of images affect short-term memory for those images. When you watch a movie depicting a rapid sequence of images, you're more likely to remember images that have strong emotional content -- especially images that are arousing, whether they depict positive or negative things. Most fascinating of all: when we see images for a very short time, we're more likely to remember positive images, but when we view them for a longer period, we're more likely to remember negative ones.
But our discussion didn't address some of the…
dmunger | March 6, 2007What types of images are you more likely to remember over the short-term? Pleasant? Bright? Arousing? Disturbing? One method of testing short-term visual memory is to flash a rapid series of pictures, then ask viewers which ones they saw. The pictures are shown so quickly that it's impossible to remember them all. Click on the image below to view a movie (Quicktime required). Wait for the entire movie to load, then watch it. You'll see 12 photos rapidly flash by. Play it twice, but no more.
Other than the first and the last one, did you remember any? I'll put a quick test below (fair warning…
dmunger | February 27, 2007Our visual system is exceptionally good at detecting change -- as long as the change takes place while we're looking. If you glance at a scene, then look away for a moment, your ability to detect a change is substantially impaired. Changes that would be obvious when we're looking can become maddeningly difficult to detect if we're distracted for even a tenth of a second.
Take a look at this quick movie (QuickTime required) -- the picture will alternate flashing with a distractor pattern. Each time the picture flashes, a portion of the picture will change in some way. Can you see what's…