Research
dmunger | August 3, 2006[originally published March 2, 2005]
Take a look at the following movie (quicktime required). The movie will alternately flash a picture of a desk and a patterned block. Your job is to see if anything about the picture of the desk changes each time it flashes. Don't replay the movie when you get to the end; just stop.
Did you notice any changes? Most people won't spot any changes at all when they watch this movie the first time. But watch the image as you press play again, and you'll see that the desk has changed significantly from the beginning to the end of the movie. I actually rotated…
dmunger | August 1, 2006One of the summer jobs I had during college was working for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center in Seattle. My job was to do data entry for a breast cancer study; it was simultaneously one of the most boring and depressing jobs I ever had. I sorted through the medical records of hundreds of women, found their chemotherapy dosage regimens, then entered their dosages for weeks and weeks of therapy. For accuracy, I had to enter all the data twice. Even as I was entering the data, I could notice a pattern: the women who completed their entire chemotherapy regimens lived, and those who did…
dmunger | July 31, 2006[originally posted on March 16, 2005]
I've taken only two pictures of the Mona Lisa, and both turned out about the same: they captured the frenzied attempts of dozens of tourists trying to take a picture of the most-recognized image in the world. Here's the one I took last summer:
I hadn't noticed it until now, but the motion of the painting in the background seems to mirror the chaotic struggle of the tourists with their cameras. I wonder if the Louvre's curators placed it there as a sort of an inside joke.
But this post isn't about museum curators, it's about one feature of the Mona Lisa…
dmunger | July 27, 2006[originally posted December 9, 2005]
A few months ago, Jon Stewart opened the eyes of his Daily Show audience when he interviewed the author of the book On Bullshit. Viewers accustomed to hearing the familiar bleep when Stewart enters foul-mouth mode were surprised to find that the word came through completely uncensored. Stewart himself reveled in his new freedom, repeating the word "bullshit" dozens of times over the course of the interview. It was difficult not to notice the word every time he spoke it.
Adam K. Anderson of the University of Toronto, who specializes in studying attention,…
dmunger | July 25, 2006We've written a lot on Cognitive Daily about the relationship between violent video game play and real-world aggressive behavior. While we feel the evidence showing that playing violent games does cause real aggression is compelling, a frequent critique of our analysis is that other activities, such as competitive sports, may also lead to violence. "Should we ban football?" the commenters opine. We've replied that football is a separate issue which doesn't negate the video game evidence. (For the record, we don't think we should ban violent video games, and the incidence of head injuries and…
dmunger | July 24, 2006[originally posted April 6, 2005]
Listen to these two musical excerpts and note any differences you discern:
Ave Maria, version 1
Ave Maria, version 2
(Source: courtesy of Mayumi Hamamoto and Kyota Ko)
If you're a typical nonmusician, you will probably notice some sort of difference between the two excerpts. Maybe one seems to be played at a different tempo, or with different instrumentation, or is a bit longer or shorter. You probably won't think either clip sounds unpleasant, and you might not notice any differences at all.
If you are a professional musician, on the other hand, you may find…
dmunger | July 20, 2006[article originally posted September 27, 2005]
All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it.
In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical differences between the eyes of many women and those of most men. "…
terrasig | July 20, 2006Is it me or does anyone else feel like Terra Sigillata is becoming ScienceBlogs.com-version of the obituaries section of your local newspaper?
This just in from the NCI Cancer Bulletin:
Dr. Robert B. Dickson Dies at 54
Former NCI investigator Dr. Robert B. Dickson died on June 24, in Kensington, Md., at the age of 54. He was considered one of the world's leading researchers in breast cancer.
Dr. Dickson began his career in 1980 in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of NCI's Center for Cancer Research (CCR), where he was the first scientist to discover the link between estrogen and breast…
dmunger | July 18, 2006Is beauty a universal standard? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? Some research on attractiveness, including some we've discussed on CogDaily, suggests that "average" faces are the most attractive, and that most people agree on what makes a pretty face.
But Johannes Hönekopp has recently questioned the statistics behind these studies. Consider a hypothetical study that asks participants to rate the attractiveness of Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney on a scale of 1 to 10. From one perspective, nearly all judges might give both faces extremely high marks. Taken from this point of view, a…
dmunger | July 17, 2006[article originally posted July 6, 2005]
Today's article is one of my all-time favorites. It was originally written by Katherine Kiechel, an undergraduate at Williams College as part of her honors thesis, and could serve as a model for others in its simplicity and ingenuity (the report I'm discussing here was revised and coauthored by her professor, Saul Kassin: "The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation," Psychological Science, 1996). Some empirical work has been done on false confessions, and at least one example of a genuine false confession…
dmunger | July 11, 2006For many Americans, the healing process after the attacks of September 11, 2001, began with the publication of a special issue of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Headlines like those in the illustration below meant we could finally start to laugh about the tragedy:
But some have suggested that positive emotions such as happiness and optimism are inappropriate at times of crisis, especially when so many innocent lives have been destroyed. Sure, they might provide temporary relief, but does appealing to the lighter side actually help us deal with the crisis at hand?
A team led by Barbara…
terrasig | July 11, 2006Do you live near Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, or Southern Denmark/Rostock, Germany and have at least two relatives (or yourself) over the age of 80? The US National Institutes of Health has funded researchers interested in recruiting you and family members to find out the secrets of longevity. (see full press release below the fold)
We're a little too late in the Pharmboy family, but I am certain that 84-year-old PharmGranny would say that it was the constant stream of good Polish vodka that allowed her to live with a BMI over 40 and an average blood pressure of 190/140. The late 96-year-…
dmunger | July 10, 2006Nearly all prejudicial attitudes are now taboo in America. Sixty years ago, it might have been acceptable to deny someone a job or service in a business because of skin color or gender, but now such overt discrimination is almost universally condemned. Even people with disabilities are accommodated. Yet although obesity is on the rise in America, overweight people continue to face difficulty. They are rated lower on job performance evaluations even when the work they do is qualitatively the same as normal weight individuals.
Why does such discrimination continue even as overt discrimination…
dmunger | July 5, 2006"Keep your eye on the ball" is a mantra I've heard applied to several sports: baseball, for hitting, football, for receiving, and golf, for teeing it up. It wasn't surprising to me when I read recently that cricketers also use this platitude to teach batsmen how to hit effectively.
The sum total of my experience with cricket is watching multi-ethic games in Van Cortland Park through our Bronx apartment window while Greta and I were finishing graduate school about 12 years ago. I didn't pick up on many of the rules, but I was stunned to see that cricketers, unlike baseball players, actually…
dmunger | June 29, 2006One of the amazing things about the Stroop Effect is how much good research is being done based on this simple phenomenon, over 70 years later. One of the neatest recent experiments was created by Peter Wühr and Florian Waszak. I think I've created a simple animation that replicates their results. Click on the image below to bring up a short animated GIF. You'll see an image flash quickly, followed by a blank screen. As quickly as possible after the image flashes, say the color of the rectangle in front. Ignore any words printed on the rectangles; you just want to name the color of the…
dmunger | June 28, 2006When I play video games with my son Jim, I'm generally at a tremendous disadvantage. Most of the time, Jim has had more experience with the particular game we're playing, but even when we try a brand-new game, he just seems to get his bearings more quickly than I do. He doesn't have more experience with games or computers than me -- I played just as many games as he did when I was his age, and I've had an extra 25 years to hone my skills.
At age 39, I don't consider myself "old," and since I work with computers for 8 or more hours a day, I'm certainly not intimidated by the games or the…
dmunger | June 26, 2006Developmental psychologists since Piaget have been interested in how well children are able to take the perspective of another. Piaget's laboratory had a large table with elaborate models on top; children who were able to take the perspective of a doll on the table and explain what the table looked like from her perspective instead of their own perspective were said to be at a later developmental stage.
But understanding whether a doll can "see" something doesn't always literally require taking her perspective. Take a look at this simple arrangement of objects on a table:
You don't have to…
dmunger | June 23, 2006The brain can be a good multitasker, using the same systems for unrelated functions. For example, the sensorimotor system may be used for imagining objects and concepts. What's more, when one part of the brain fails to do is job, another part can sometimes fill in the gaps.
Yet some disorders do cause intractable problems. People with autism, for example, have difficulty recognizing personality traits in others. While the specific neurological cause of autism has yet to be isolated, one hypothesis suggests that the key is an inability to develop episodic memory. If you can't recall the…
dmunger | June 19, 2006Last week's article on the Aymara language and metaphorical depictions of time generated a lot of discussion. I think part of the confusion there had to do less with the specific example and more with basic questions about metaphorical representations of time, so today I'm going to cover some of the research that led up to the Aymara research.
In the article, we conducted a poll where we asked participants a simple question: If your Wednesday meeting is "moved forward two days," what day is it on now? About half the respondents said "Friday," and the other half said "Monday."
How is that…
dmunger | June 16, 2006Greta and I -- and the kids -- had fun watching the movie Bride and Prejudice, which told the story of Jane Austen's renowned novel Pride and Prejudice, only Bollywood style: the "Elizabeth Bennet" character's angstings about her parent's plans to arrange her marriage with an intolerably dull cousin were punctuated with colorful Indian-pop dance numbers. As in the 1813 novel, her parents wanted her to marry for long-term companionship and security, not flash-in-the pan romantic love. While arranged marriages seem a quaint relic in twenty-first century America, they are still quite common in…