Research
dmunger | October 16, 2006The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget developed several tasks to show how very young children were different from older kids. One of the most surprising is the "conservation" task: a 5-year-old, who talks clearly and appears quite bright, will watch water being poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, slender one. She will say that the tall glass has "more" water. A 7-year-old won't make the same mistake.
Surely, then, adults are aware that short, fat glasses have deceptively large volumes, right? Not according to a recent article in BMJ. Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum asked…
dmunger | October 11, 2006Cognitive Daily would not exist without chocolate. Every week, I buy a bag of chocolate covered raisins, and I portion them out precisely each day so that I've finished them by all by (casual) Friday. I try to time my consumption to coincide with the most difficult part of the job: reporting on peer-reviewed journal articles. The little news items, Ask a ScienceBlogger responses, and other miscellaneous announcements can be completed unassisted by chocolate, but then there wouldn't be much reason to visit the site. Sometimes even the chocolate raisins aren't enough, and I head for the nearest…
dmunger | October 3, 2006Tired of all the hoopla about the Blogger SAT Challenge? Do you not want to hear another word about Booker T. Washington and why he is or is not like George W. Bush? Then have I got a study for you: Yolanda Martins and Patricia Pliner have conducted a fascinating experiment about food preferences -- or, rather, what precise attributes make food disgusting.
Though disgust has long been considered to be a "basic emotion," there has been surprisingly little research on what foods evoke disgust (hopefully by now you've figured out that you probably don't want to read this post too close to a meal…
dmunger | September 29, 2006Occasionally you read a journal article so well-titled, you have to steal it for your blog post title. "Smells Like Clean Spirit" is a report by Rob Holland, Merel Hendricks, and Henk Aarts, in which they use smells to unconsciously modify their victims' participants' behavior.
In some ways, this research is nothing new. As the researchers point out, if we smell chocolate chip cookies, we may decide to eat; if we smell a garbage truck, we may walk faster down the street. We might associate pine scent with Christmas, or pheromones with sex. But most of these associations involve people being…
dmunger | September 27, 2006
Thousands of police departments use face composite software to help create a picture of crime suspects. You've probably seen one of the systems in use on TV: witnesses build a picture of the suspect by choosing each individual facial feature -- hair, eyes, nose, and so on. But what happens when the suspect is captured and the witness is asked to identify the real perpetrator in a lineup? Does the witness remember the actual face they saw at the crime scene, or the composite face created at the police station? A recent study has found that the process of creating a face composite can have a…
dmunger | September 20, 2006In 2001, Mark Orr and Stellan Ohlsson found that experts preferred more complex bluegrass music compared to non-experts, but there was no difference in preferences with jazz music. The model they were using to describe music preferences did not appear to describe all types of music. But what if the problem wasn't the model, but the "experts"?
All the participants in the 2001 study were college students. "Experts" had an average of 9.7 years of music training. This seems like a lot, but compared to professional musicians, it's still not much. In their new study, Orr and Ohlsson recruited 22…
dmunger | September 19, 2006A week ago Friday we conducted a little survey about musical preferences. Readers were asked to listen to three different clips, then say which music they preferred. We promised you we'd be back to let you know what the preferences were, and whether they said anything about how preferences are formed.
Our survey was inspired by much more exhaustive work conducted by Mark G. Orr and Sellan Ohlsson. They are interested in the question of how expertise informs preferences. Do experienced jazz musicians like the same music as untrained listeners? One dimension you might want to consider is…
terrasig | September 17, 2006This year's recipients of the Lasker Awards were announced yesterday. These awards from The Lasker Foundation are often referred to as the "American Nobels."
The award for Basic Medical Research went to three scientists for "the prediction and discovery of telomerase, a remarkable RNA-containing enzyme that synthesizes the ends of chromosomes, protecting them and maintaining the integrity of the genome."
Elizabeth H. Blackburn (UC-San Francisco)
Carol W. Greider (Johns Hopkins)
Jack W. Szostak (Harvard)
Most cancer researchers, biochemists, and cell biologists know all three of these…
dmunger | September 14, 2006Color categories, as we pointed out in this post, are remarkably consistent, even across different cultures and languages. "TLTB" pointed out in the comments that for people with color blindness, the color categories might not make much sense. He brought up an excellent point, one that becomes doubly perplexing when we realize that no two individual eyes are the same -- indeed, retinal scanning is considered more accurate than fingerprints in establishing someone's true identity.
The distribution of cones and rods across the retina varies substantially. What's more, the macula, a region in…
dmunger | September 11, 2006The World Color Survey is a massive project which attempts to understand how colors are categorized in different languages. The researchers studied 110 different languages, none of which had a written component, which ensured that only spoken word categories would be used to describe the colors.
Do the speakers all understand colors the same way? Is "red" red whether you're speaking Chumburu or Saramaccan? Rolf Kuehni undertook an analysis of the data to try to find out.
To discuss colors and language, it's important to differentiate between the word we're using to describe a color, and the…
dmunger | September 6, 2006Sometimes we think of emotions as completely separate from the more "objective" parts of the mind. You might believe that emotion can sometimes cloud your judgment, but it certainly can't affect your vision system. Or can it?
Take a look at the following image. It's my attempt to use Photoshop to make a Gabor patch -- a means of testing vision.
Gabor patches are useful because researchers can systematically vary their contrast and determine the limits of the visual system. For example, try this quick movie. The screen will remain blank for a second, then quickly flash four Gabor patches.…
terrasig | September 6, 2006My ScienceBlogs.com colleague, Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript, has just posted on the announcement of a 3rd major San Diego/La Jolla research institute with plans to establish a presence in Florida.
Current issues of Roman numeral mixups notwithstanding, Florida has been very quietly rising on the national biomedical research scene, especially in the years since your humble Pharmboy stomped terra in Hogtown.
I discussed this issue about two weeks ago here at Terra Sigillata.
Therein, you'll find lots of good links to Florida research universities big and small and some editorial…
dmunger | August 31, 2006Just by listening to music, we can learn a lot about its structures and conventions. For example, even you have no musical training, you can tell that something is wrong with this scale (it's followed by a proper C-major scale):
But we learn a lot more than just standard scales when we listen to music. When you're exposed to a particular type of music for many years, you learn much more. Consider the following sequence of chords:
Anyone who's been raised listening to Western music should recognize this sequence as an appropriate musical phrase (if you don't read music, don't worry -- I'll…
dmunger | August 29, 2006Listen to this short audio clip:
Now listen to this one:
Notice any difference? I didn't think so. But if you were a 5-month-old infant named Caroline, the difference would be crystal clear. In the second clip, your name would be indistinguishable from background noise, but in the first clip, you'd be able to hear it above the din. Both clips are played against the identical background noise: ten different women reading ten different stories. But in the first clip, the name "Caroline" is 10 dB louder than the backround noise, while in the second clip, it's just 5 dB louder.
Being able to…
dmunger | August 24, 2006
Last year, my dad got his pilot's license. He took me up with him a couple months later, and while the view was spectacular, the most surprising aspect of flying is how much of a pilot's time is spent avoiding other aircraft. You might think there's plenty of room up there, and you'd be right, but it also means you have to scan a vast space to locate other planes. Once you spot one, you need to keep track of it to make sure you're not on a collision course. Sometimes, you'll need to track four or more other planes. Is there a limit to how many objects we can track? And how, exactly, do we…
dmunger | August 22, 2006 Learning to navigate through an unfamiliar environment can be a difficult challenge. Could you find your way through the crowded, narrow streets of the city depicted at left -- especially if the signs were in a foreign language (bonus points if you can identify the city in the comments section!)?
If you do have to get around in a new place, what's the best way to learn? People have different preferences -- some prefer to look at a map first, while others orient themselves using landmarks. Is one method better for you? I prefer maps; nothing's more frustrating to me than getting directions…
dmunger | August 17, 2006By the time a baby is 4 months old, she has begun to amass an impressive array of skills. She might be able to roll over, as Nora is demonstrating in this picture. She will almost certainly be able to follow an object with her eyes as it moves across her field of vision. But research about the ability of babies to follow objects has had conflicting results. In some cases, babies this age seem to understand that when one object passes out of view behind another, it's still "there," just hidden from view.
Consider a simple example: a single ball moves back and forth behind a rectangular box,…
dmunger | August 15, 2006When Jim and Nora talk about the social groups in their school, they matter-of-factly categorize almost every fellow student into stereotyped pigeonholes. There are the nerds, the rockers, the cools, the goths, and of course, the jocks.
The assumption, naturally, is that none of these groups intersect. Jocks are dumb, nerds are smart, and cools could be smart if they cared about grades. But what of this "dumb jock" stereotype? Does it actually pan out in real life?
Herbert Marsh and Sabina Kleitman have conducted an exhaustive study of the records of over 12,000 American students, following…
dmunger | August 11, 2006What in the world is this thing?
It's called an optokinetic drum, and it's one of the many implements of torture you'll find in a spatial orientation lab. In an optokinetic drum, you sit or stand inside while the entire drum rotates around you. By changing the pattern on the inside of the drum, or by changing the way the drum rotates, a researcher can easily make you lose your lunch, breakfast, or even last night's dinner.
I got the picture of the drum from the Ashton Graybill Spatial Orientation Lab, where you'll find plenty of other devices that I sincerely hope the U.S. military doesn't…
dmunger | August 8, 2006Take a look at this short video clip. Can you tell which dot is blue and which is yellow?
Click here to play
Unless you have a rare vision impairment, this task should be easy for you. But read on, and we'll show you how you can become blind to this difference in as little as 40 minutes.
The human visual system is amazingly adaptive to eye movements. Consider this: if you film a video from a moving car, the resulting image is so jiggly that it's unwatchable. But if you're riding in the car, even on a bumpy road, the outside world appears stable and smooth.
Or take a camcorder and move it…