Research
omnibrain | December 18, 2006
In no particular order...
1) Being a south paw promotes survival from attacks (well at least in crabs). It seems that
The left-handed advantage is realized when snails interact with predators of opposite handedness. Some predatory crabs are "righties" -- and have a specialized tooth on their right claw that acts like a can opener to crack and peel the snail shells. "The 'sinistral advantage,' or advantage to being left-handed, is that it would be like using a can opener backwards for the crab to crack and peel the snail shell,"
Does something like this apply to humans? We're still…
omnibrain | December 15, 2006Are you kidding me?
A study of 100,000 drivers finds that the month you were born is far more significant than your age in predicting car crashes.
The study, based on North American driving statistics as gathered by an online insurance quoting service, ranks the likelihood of getting involved in an accident or receiving a traffic ticket -- and both -- based on an individual's astrological sign.
Are you worried about your risks of getting in an accident? You should be if you are a Libra since they seem to crash the most!
Can you think of any reason for these results?
Here's the full list of…
dmunger | December 14, 2006I'm not bitter about this, honest I'm not, but it does often seem that people who know you very well end up buying really lousy gifts. What I really want to find out is this: why do they do that? It turns out, market researchers want to know, too. How can they have a prayer of selling people things they don't want when people can't even convince their loved ones to buy them things they do want?
Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop have designed a clever study to examine this very issue. They wanted to know whether couples who've been together for at least six months were any better at predicting each…
dmunger | December 13, 2006Keith Payne's work on racial stereotyping brings up an intriguing possibility. During the weapons identification task, viewers are more likely to erroneously identify a harmless object as a weapon if it was preceded by a black face compared to a white face. They are also more accurate identifying weapons after seeing black faces compared with white faces.
It's possible that both of these results are due to the same underlying mental process, but Payne's research also invites another possible assessment: that separate processes are responsible for the two different behaviors. One behavior:…
signout | December 10, 2006Today, in another of her cantankerous and directionless "interviews," Deborah Solomon of the New York Times at least got something right. This time, the subject of her bullying is Louann Brizendine, a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Brizendine, who in her picture insists on the heeled ankle bootie, just came out with a book about why all women are catty bitches. (Finally!)
Near the end of the interview, Solomon notes that while Brizendine draws on other scientists' research in writing her book, she hasn't done any research herself. In…
dmunger | December 7, 2006Very few of us can avoid stereotyping others. When we're actively trying to avoid racial stereotyping, we often end up looking ridiculous. But the very fact that we can try to avoid it suggests that there's something more to racial stereotypes than a "stereotype center" in the brain. If stereotyping was completely automatic, we'd be no more able to resist stereotypes than we are able to stop seeing.
So if we can try to resist stereotyping, why doesn't resisting always work? The article I just linked points to a study showing that people -- even police officers -- are more likely to mistakenly…
dmunger | December 6, 2006The notion that thinking faster could make you happy may seem on the face of it absurd. But consider some of the evidence. People with mania, who complain of racing thoughts, often find the sensation exhilarating. When you meet someone who's in a manic phase, they often seem cheerier and more pleasant than anyone you've known.
Research in an entirely different field, music, has found that the tempo of background music played during a test can affect performance in tests of spatial ability. The faster the music, the better the mood of the participants, and the better they performed.
Emily…
dmunger | December 5, 2006The cafe wall illusion has the dramatic effect of making a straight line appear slanted:
That's right, the line is precisely horizontal. It was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, one of the world's foremost authorities on visual illusion, who is also a wonderful artist. In addition to the hundreds of other illusions he's created, he's posted an entire page of illusions all based on the cafe wall effect.
But why does the line appear to be slanted? It must have something to do with the juxtaposition of light and dark patches, but what exactly? Take a look at this more elaborate illusion which…
dmunger | November 30, 2006The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting?
Perhaps, but an important additional question is this: were they predisposed to believe he was armed simply because he was black? Consider this quick movie:
It will flash two pictures. One man is armed, the other unarmed. Who do you shoot? I've primed you to think about race, so it's not really a fair test. If you were a police officer who believed…
dmunger | November 29, 2006One of the unanswered questions in Krista Hyde and Isabelle Peretz's research on amusia ("tone-deafness") is why amusics frequently say they are unable to clap to the rhythm of a song, or to dance well. In Hyde and Peretz's study, amusics could detect rhythm changes as well as normal individuals, even while being unable to detect changes in musical pitch.
Hyde and Peretz speculated that amusics might not be able to detect rhythm changes when the pitch of the notes change -- that their problems with rhythm might be directly related to the fact that amusics can't detect many changes in pitch.…
dmunger | November 22, 2006Do you recognize the person depicted in this video?
How about this one?
The first video is actually a "chimera," formed by fusing half-images of two well-known faces together, then animated using 3D projection software. The second video shows us just the top half of another famous person's head, rendered in the same way. If you're like most people, you have a much easier time recognizing the face in the second movie than you do either of the faces in the first one. But why?
I can assure you, both of the faces in the first movie are just as famous as the face in the second movie, and you're…
dmunger | November 15, 2006There was some doubt as to whether the "tone-deafness" test I linked to Monday really tests for amusia. The defining trait of amusia is the inability to discern the difference between different musical pitches. So here's a test that might generate a more clear-cut result. The following track plays five sequences of five notes. In every case, four of the notes are the same. The only note that ever varies is the second-to-last note. Ideally, these sequences would be played in a random order, but for a quick-and-dirty test, I'm going to gradually increase the pitch of the fourth note in the…
dmunger | 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 few miles from each other develop such different attitudes?…
dmunger | November 7, 2006Take a look at this video of a professional drummer playing the conga:
It's easy to see that the sound coming from the drum is perfectly synchronized with the motion of the drummer's hands. Or is it? When a sound enters your ear, it takes less than 1 millisecond for the signal to be transported from the outer to the inner ear, where it can be perceived by the brain. The equivalent process in the eye takes 50 milliseconds. Then there is the matter of the physical difference in the speed of light versus sound. If the drummer is between 15 and 20 meters away, the faster travel of the light…
dmunger | November 2, 2006Conventional wisdom has it that giving young children chocolate will cause them to become fidgety. This belief is so pervasive that many parents won't give their kids candy within several hours of bedtime, convinced their children won't be able to sleep. After Halloween, many parents ration their kids' candy consumption, again based at least partly on the belief that too much candy will cause kids to go bonkers.
But when Michelle Ingram and Ronald Rapee became interested in the phenomenon, they were surprised to find that in fact very little research has been done on the effect of chocolate…
dmunger | October 31, 2006
Any grown-up would be surprised to see SpongeBob Squarepants show up in a Batman movie. Clearly, these characters inhabit two different fantasy worlds: one lives in a fabulous mansion near bustling Gotham City, while the other inhabits an underwater pineapple. Grown-ups divide fantasy worlds into non-intersecting sets: If Batman has even heard of SpongeBob, he would believe him to be a fictional character.
But what about children? Do they have the same understanding of the distinction between separate fictional worlds? Kids do understand the difference between reality and make-believe…
dmunger | October 30, 2006Face recognition is a task which humans do with little effort, even though in fact it's a tremendously difficult problem. To recognize a face, we need to be able to ignore traits that change over time, while focusing in on details that remain constant. A simple computer program, for example, would have difficulty recognizing that Jim frowning (before his fries arrive) is the same person as Jim smiling (after his fries arrive).
The fact that we have little difficulty recognizing our friends and family regardless of their facial expressions has led researchers to speculate that recognizing…
dmunger | October 25, 2006Everyone knows the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Bound by that axiom, magazines, newspapers, and most of all, TV, bombard us with pictures every day. The latest hot internet properties aren't text-based sites like Google but picture-based sites like Flickr and YouTube. Psychological research backs this up: we do remember pictures more readily than we remember words.
The next question, of course, is "why?" Recent research by Paul W. Foos and Paula Goolkasian is beginning to shed light on the difference between memory for pictures and words. They had previously found that while…
dmunger | October 23, 2006There's nothing cooler for a perception researcher (or writer) than a new visual illusion. When I learned about this one, I spent half the day Thursday trying to recreate it, but I couldn't get it to work. Finally, in five minutes on Friday morning, I think I figured it out. (Update: Actually, as it turned out, I didn't figure it out at all. In the meantime, Chris from Mixing Memory pointed me to Shams' web page with much better demos. So let's try this again, using one of Shams' demos.) Play the movie and watch for a dot flashing in the middle of the screen. Make sure you've got the sound…
dmunger | October 17, 2006Click on the "Video Games / Technology" category over to the left and you'll see that we've covered many, many studies on the subject of video game violence, almost all of them demonstrating a link between playing violent games and real-world aggressive behavior. Nearly every time we do, we receive an influx of comments from gamers claiming that video games don't make them more aggressive. Quite the contrary, they argue, the games help them wind down, releasing pent-up anger harmlessly in a virtual world rather than causing real harm.
Offering counterexamples (such as the fact that games…