Research
dmunger | July 25, 2005With my high school reunion coming up, memories just seem to well up out of nowhere. One of the most powerful was that of my cross-country coach's booming voice yelling "stride, Munger, stride!" across the track. I wasn't the best runner on the team, but whenever I heard that voice, I'd always start running faster. Sometimes when I'm out for my morning run, I wish I still had my coach's voice to urge me on.
I've never had any doubt that verbal encouragement helped me perform better on the track, but I have wondered what exactly about the encouragement is helping. Does it just increase my "…
dmunger | July 22, 2005I've created a quick animation of distorted pictures of my son Jim, together with some normal ones. Take a minute or so to watch the animation, then decide if the last picture you're shown looks "normal" to you. Click on the normal (but pre-eyeglasses and braces) photo of Jim below to begin:
I'll let you know whether or not the final picture was distorted in the comments.
A large body of research has found that we perceive faces that are closer to the average as more beautiful than distinctive faces. We've written about one such study here, but even more surprisingly other experiments have…
dmunger | July 19, 2005We've posted on boundary extension before, here, here, and here, but we've never written about boundary extension and kids. Boundary extension is when we remember more of a picture than was actually shown to us, as if our mind is actively creating a portion of the image we didn't see, beyond its boundaries. A 2002 team led by John Seamon found that people of all ages experience boundary extension.
Some research has found evidence that boundary extension doesn't work for all images. We reported on a study by Andrew Mathews and Bundy Mackintosh suggesting that for emotional, arousing images,…
dmunger | July 18, 2005Baby rats, only 5 days old and still very much reliant on their mothers for food, can be artificially dehydrated by injecting them with a saline hypertonic solution. If a source of water is placed very close to the rat's snout, it will drink. But 21-day-old rats who have just been weaned from their mothers and who readily eat and drink on their own can be injected with the same saline hypertonic and won't drink any more than non-dehydrated rats the same age. The difference is that the older rats still have to decide to drink—the water is available in their cages, but they still must actively…
dmunger | July 14, 2005We've reported on flashbulb memory before, with the Talarico and Rubin study and the MacKay and Ahmetzanov study. First observed in 1977 by Brown and Kulik, flashbulb memories—memories about shocking events—were supposed to be more vivid and long-lasting than normal memories. Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin seemed to have put a damper on the whole concept of flashbulb memory with their finding that while flashbulb memories are more intense and people are more confident about them, they are no more accurate than normal memories. Donald MacKay and Marat Ahmetzanov, using an experimental test…
dmunger | July 13, 2005Take a look at this picture I took last year when we went to Venice. Look at it fairly closely, because there will be a "test" at the end of this post.
We have posted on boundary extension before: it's a simple phenomenon where our memory for a picture is consistently different from the actual picture we saw before. We remember a larger frame, or boundary for the picture, than was actually present. This effect can be measured in many different ways—for example, by asking people to sketch the picture they saw, or draw the frame on a larger picture, or, as was done in today's experiment, by…
dmunger | July 11, 2005There's something about kids and dogs. The phrase "A boy and his dog" brings up quite a range of images: from the sweetness of Norman Rockwell to what sounds like a truly bizarre movie from 1975. Despite not being a dog-person myself (okay, not being a pet-person at all), I find the results from a study that looked at kids and dogs amazing. Marina Pavlova and her colleagues at the University of Tüebingen were curious about how well kids would understand point-light displays. Imagine placing little lights on the major joints of someone's body (hips, elbows, etc) and then watching them move…
dmunger | July 8, 2005Are attractiveness and distinctiveness related? Are we more likely to remember a pretty face than an ordinary one? This data suggests not:
When people are asked to rate faces for attractiveness and deviation from an average face, there's a clear correlation: the more attractive the face, the less it deviates from average. Average faces are more beautiful, it seems. But now consider this data:
Here, people were asked to rate faces on the same scale of attractiveness, but instead of rating whether a face deviated from the average, they were asked whether a face would stand out in a crowd.…
dmunger | July 6, 2005Today'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 has been reported: Paul Ingram, who…
dmunger | July 1, 2005Take a look at the following two movies. Your job is to determine whether the yellow square is moving faster in the first movie or the second movie.
If you're like me, you're probably cynical enough to guess that they were moving at the same speed. But if you're honest and you just go with your initial impression of what you're seeing, it's hard not to perceive the second movie as much slower than the first one. What you're witnessing is Michotte's launching effect paradigm, first observed in 1946 by Albert Michotte: when two objects collide, we ascribe the motion of the second object to…
dmunger | June 30, 2005Most religions, from Anabaptism to Zoroastrianism, feature some version of Christianity's "Golden Rule": Do undo others, as you would have them do unto you. Aside from being a nice concept, how do we benefit from helping others? From an individual perspective, wouldn't we be better off if we just let others help us out, without giving anything in return? A 2003 study by a team led by Stephanie Brown indicates that we wouldn't (Stephanie L. Brown, Randolph M. Nesse, and Amiram D. Vinokur, University of Michigan; and Dylan M. Smith, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, "Providing Social Support may…
dmunger | June 28, 2005Though you'll never hear her tell you, Greta is an excellent musician. She's a brilliant English horn and oboe player, and she can also handle the piano keyboard. When a nonmusician hears her play, they'll often tell her how they wished their parents had made them practice when they were younger (unfortunately, our kids Jim and Nora don't seem to appreciate this logic when we tell them it's time to practice!). Everyone appreciates a good musician, but if the responses of our own children are any indication, few of us are willing to put in the practice it takes to learn to perform well.
We all…
dmunger | June 24, 2005I like rock music, but my father-in-law doesn't. My son Jim likes horror movies, but his mom doesn't. While some of our preferences can be explained easily—for example, we usually don't like things that cause us pain—others are more difficult to understand. When there's not an obvious reason for a preference, mere exposure to an item can lead to preference. Studies have found this "mere exposure effect" for words, photos, objects—nearly anything, really.
What's less certain is what causes the mere exposure effect: two competing explanations have been proposed. The first is the uncertainty…
dmunger | June 22, 2005Today's research psychologists typically don't think much of Sigmund Freud. His theories, which tended to be based on literary analysis and interviews with his patients rather than controlled experiments, have been largely discredited (though they continue to be influential in the field of—you guessed it—literary analysis). However, he did discover an important phenomenon which continues to be investigated today. Freud noted that adults do not remember childhood events occurring before they were as old as six. This period of childhood amnesia is now generally believed to end at about age…
dmunger | June 20, 2005Every parent wants his or her child to do well in school. They help the kids with their homework, volunteer in the classroom, do everything they can think of to help their children succeed. But what type of elementary school education actually leads to older kids who do better in school? Typically students are tested at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, and if they improve, their educational program is labeled as successful. This type of assessment, though valuable, sheds little light on what happens in the long run.
A team of researchers led by Gian Vittorio Caprara sought…
dmunger | June 17, 2005There's been a great deal of research on appetite and satiation, both on animals and humans. For humans, of course, the motivation is often focused on how we can lose weight. Almost everyone believes they would look better if they could just lose a few pounds. Most of the research has focused on the taste of food and the physical sensation of fullness, and the results—as you might have suspected—have been inconclusive.
There is some evidence that if you leave the remnants of a meal around (used candy wrappers, for example), then people will eat less than if the evidence of the food is…
dmunger | June 15, 2005It has been known for some time that cell phones can lead to driving accidents. After watching the behavior of some other drivers on the road, I'm sometimes surprised that there aren't more cell-phone-related accidents than there already are. With well over 100 million cell phone users in the U.S. alone, the problem isn't going to get any smaller.
Until recently, there has been some dispute about exactly why cell phones are unsafe for drivers. Two high-profile studies in the 1990s suggested that any manual manipulation of devices in a car, including not only dialing a cell phone, but also…
dmunger | June 13, 2005Adults have been found cross-culturally to prefer blue to other colors. It's a nearly universal preference. But does this preference occur naturally, or do children and infants have different preferences? Prior to 2001, there wasn't a definitive answer to this question. In that year, Marcel Zentner of the University of Geneva conducted a study that not only answered that question, but also sought to explore the relationship between color and emotion ("Preferences for colours and Colour-Emotion Combinations in Early Childhood," Developmental Science, 2001).
Zentner's study showed 3- and 4-year…
dmunger | June 10, 2005When I was about twelve years old, I came up with an idea for a massive practical joke to play on an unsuspecting baby. For its entire childhood, everyone around the baby would conspire to convince it that the sky was green. Then at some point in the future, perhaps in front of the entire sixth grade class at Whitworth Elementary School, the truth would be revealed, and one poor kid's world would be turned upside-down.
Somehow I was never able to recruit enough people to pull this ruse off, but it does beg the question: would such a joke even be possible, or would our natural perceptual…
dmunger | June 8, 2005When I started work on a memoir about my childhood, I thought remembering what actually happened would be the easy part. I had very specific memories of very specific events, and I wrote them down exactly as I remembered them. One memory involved my stepsister winning Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy album at a pumpkin carving contest in 1974. I remember it as clear as the day it happened. Only Rhinestone Cowboy was released in 1975.
At about that same time, Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving were conducting the experiment that formed the basis a new framework of human memory: we don't remember…