Research
dmunger | June 7, 2005Learning to walk was a passion for my son Jimmy. He would sweat and struggle with it until finally he had it mastered—and then it was off to the races. My daughter Nora, by contrast, didn't seem to mind not being able to walk. After all, if you didn't walk, then some sweet grown-up would soon show up and carry you wherever you wanted to go. The photo below illustrates another way Nora convinced others to do the walking for her:
Nora apparently was oblivious to the fact that parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles around the world watch infants' progress in walking with anxious…
dmunger | June 3, 2005As every high-school senior knows, many colleges and universities take "racial diversity" into account when selecting students for admission. The practice is controversial, because it could mean that qualified students are denied admission, and those who are admitted must tolerate other students with a less rigorous academic background. The institutions often argue that their admissions practices are justified because increased diversity creates a more effective learning environment.
There is some research backing these claims: schools with greater racial diversity tend to have better…
dmunger | June 1, 2005When I was a kid, like most kids, I used to wait for my mom to be in a good mood before I asked her for something I wanted. I thought I was being pretty sophisticated—I understood that her decisions might be different if she was in a bad mood. However, I might not have been as sophisticated as I thought. Jennifer Dunn and Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania have found that emotion is a more important influence on trust than mood ("Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion on Trust," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005).
Mood is a simpler concept than…
dmunger | May 30, 2005The allure of music has been a recurring question for psychologists. Why do we see the need for music? Is music like language, or is it something entirely different? The attempts to answer the latter question have generated mixed results. Musicians with brain damage have retained musical ability while losing language ability. Some patients with a condition called amusia can recognize songs from their lyrics but not from the melody. On the other hand, healthy people remember melodies better when they are repeated with their original lyrics instead of the words from other songs.
Listen to the…
dmunger | May 26, 2005Heinz's green ketchup nothwithstanding, we generally like our foods to be predictable colors: milk, white; bananas, yellow; oranges—well, you get the idea. But when foods are the "right" color, do they actually taste any different? We all know that food coloring is tasteless, so what happens when we dye foods different colors?
The results so far have been difficult to pin down. A study in 1960 found that green pear nectar tasted less sweet than colorless pear nectar. A study in 1962 found no such result. A 1982 study revealed red dye made strawberry juice sweeter; a 1989 study found it did…
dmunger | May 25, 2005Take a look at the following maps of brain activity:
The maps were made using ERP recordings of volunteers' brains as they were tested for memory of pictures. The ERP (event-related potential) records electrical potentials using a variety of electrodes (primarily EEGs, or electroencephalograms) placed on the scalp. The white regions of the diagrams represent areas of greater brain activity. What's striking about the diagrams is that while for the most part they are similar, kids' brains show a strikingly different pattern for memory of the context of an item than adults do.
To understand…
dmunger | May 20, 2005Ivan Pavlov, the Russian psychologist and surgeon of legendary ability (his Nobel prize is for medicine), was perhaps most famous for his experiments with dogs. Performing a tricky procedure to implant a saliva-measuring device in dogs' necks, he then trained them to recognize when food was coming. First he'd ring a bell and bring the dog food. Dogs would begin to salivate when the food arrived. After a short training period, dogs would begin salivating when the bell was rung, even if Pavlov never brought the food. This technique, now universally referred to as classical conditioning, works…
dmunger | May 18, 2005Some people—even people who really know their stuff—just don't "test well." You can talk to them face to face, and they seem perfectly well informed and intelligent, but when the money's on the line, when they've sharpened their number 2 pencils and it's time to sit down for the big exam, they just crumble.
Of course, others simply use "not testing well" as an excuse for true slackerdom, but mere laziness can't explain the fact that many otherwise well-prepared students don't perform well under pressure. They score well on the practice SAT, but not on the official test that determines their…
dmunger | May 17, 2005We know that video games can help us learn, but what exactly is it about the games that does it? Is it that fact that we're in control—for example, the way drivers in a car seem to learn the roads better than passengers? Or is it something else? Paul Wilson of the University of Leicester and Patrick Péruch of Université de la Méditerranée had been working on this problem separately for several years, with mixed results. In 2002 they combined their efforts to try to figure out what matters most for learning in a virtual environment ("The Influence of Interactivity and Attention on Spatial…
dmunger | May 13, 2005One of the oldest questions in the study of language involves how it influences our thought. One of the most controversial answers comes from Benjamin Whorf, the student of renowned anthropologist Edward Sapir: language not only influences thought; language determines thought—thought cannot exist without language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its strongest form, has been discarded by mainstream psychologists. After all, it's not difficult to come up with many examples of thought that do not involve language, such as mentally rotating an object or learning how to juggle (think about…
dmunger | May 10, 2005Yesterday we discussed the difference between children's and adults' beliefs in magic. Today we will continue that discussion, with two more experiments from the same article by Eugene Subbotsky.
Adults generally claim they don't believe in magic, but they seem to have a different set of rules for fictional objects. While they understand that a real rabbit can't change into a bird, they believe a fictional dog-bird might just be able to turn into a cat-fish. Kids, on the other hand, seem to have a consistent set of rules for both real and fictional objects.
In experiment three, Subbotsky…
dmunger | May 9, 2005Babies love to play peek-a-boo. This simple game can entertain them for hours, even if all you do is hide your face behind your hands. Part of the reason is that for babies, it is really something of a surprise that you return. For most of their first year, babies don't understand that objects exist beyond their view--out of sight is indeed out of mind. Sometime during the first year of life, children develop "object permanence"--they learn that objects still exist even when they are out of view.
In the 75 years since the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget first observed this phenomenon,…
dmunger | May 5, 2005The Stroop effect is a well-documented phenomenon that shows how easily we can be distracted from a simple task. In the classic Stroop experiment, we are shown a word, such as GREEN, and asked to indicate the color it is printed in. When the meaning of the word itself conflicts with the word's color, the task is more difficult. There's a good demo of the effect here. Go ahead and try it—it's easy and it only takes about 30 seconds. If you're like most people, you will take longer to respond to the words that are printed in an incongruent color.
The Stroop task can also be used to measure…
dmunger | May 3, 2005When we were first married, Greta and I lived in New York City for five years. One of the biggest challenges of living in New York was navigating around the subway stations, complex warrens of underground tunnels that can extend for hundreds of yards. I was certain I had the best method for figuring out where to go: try to keep a mental map of the entire station in my head, not relying so much on local landmarks as the "big picture." Greta was equally convinced that her way was best—look for local landmarks, signs, and other clues for where to go. Instead of remembering a "map," she…
dmunger | April 30, 2005We often think of music as expressing emotions, and research has backed this notion up. But typically the research has focused on melodic instruments: sweet, sorrowful violins; bright, happy guitars; melancholy, wailing oboes. So what about percussion instruments: drums, cymbals, tympani—can they express emotion too?
Listen to the following short music clips. As you listen, try to determine what emotion they are expressing. Think of it as a multiple choice test. You get to choose between solemn, tender, fearful, angry, sad, or happy.
clip 1
clip 2
clip 3
clip 4
Source: courtesy of Travis…
dmunger | April 28, 2005I used to be a high school biology teacher, and I noticed that students often found it easier to learn irrelevant information than the information I was trying to teach. When learning the steps involved in the process of cell division, the students simply memorized the pictures in their textbook. If I tested them using a different set of diagrams depicting the same process, they had difficulty completing the task. They had memorized a set of pictures, instead of the concept of mitosis.
We can learn things even when we're not consciously trying to. For example, if we try to learn a set of…
dmunger | April 26, 2005Humans readily establish false memories. If you give adults a study list of words like hot, snow, warm, winter, ice, wet, chilly, weather, heat, freeze, shiver, frost, and then test them later, they will "remember" related words like cold that weren't actually on the list. They will be as sure that cold was on the original list as they are about all the words that really were there.
Small children, age 5 to 7, by contrast, are very unlikely to make this type of error. They can memorize the words on the list, but they won't generate false memories. By the time they are 11 or so, kids begin to…
dmunger | April 25, 2005It's impossible to pay attention to everything in the visual field at once. If we could, magicians would be out of business: most "magic" tricks work by distracting the viewers' attention while the real trick is being done in plain sight.
However, if a new object enters our field of view, we quickly direct our attention that way and make note of it. This would have come in handy for our ancestors as they kept watch for predators. Now its primary use is probably avoiding car accidents (or shutting down Web browsers when the boss shows up at your cubicle!). Interestingly, this facility is not…
dmunger | April 22, 2005How is language acquired? We don't have to teach our children to speak; instead they just seem to pick it up on their own. Because language is acquired so readily, the study of language acquisition can be a messy business. What portion of language ability is "hard wired" into the brain, and what portion of it is "learned"? Or is the ability to learn what's hard-wired?
One way researchers have found to study how healthy children learn language is to study those with disorders. If we can learn how a brain malfunction affects language learning, then the specific characteristics of the…
dmunger | April 20, 2005There has been a great deal of reporting about the harmful impact of video games, including here at Cognitive Daily. Yet the simple act of playing a video game can require learning a great deal of information. We have discussed studies showing impressive perceptual gains after just a short time playing a game. Children are highly motivated to play video games (in fact, at times, it's difficult to get them to do anything else).
Yet, perhaps because of the perceived negative impact, there has been surprisingly little research on how to use games for teaching. One exception to this was a study…