Research
dmunger | April 18, 2005September 11. The Challenger disaster. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. If we were over the age of 10 when these events occurred, we all remember them vividly: where we were when we heard the news, the weather that day, how we felt. It's as if these memories were imprinted on our minds with a flashbulb. Or is it?
In 1977, Roger Brown and James Kulik published a paper in Cognition entitled "Flashbulb Memories," describing their research on individuals' memories of the Kennedy assassination. Participants reported having especially clear memories of the day it occurred, recalling…
dmunger | April 13, 2005Yesterday we reported on the results of studies on the impact of media violence. Today we'll discuss theoretical implications and responses to those studies, as reported by Craig Anderson et al. in their report "The Influence of Media Violence on Youth."
Given the fact that there is a significant correlation between media violence and aggression, Anderson and his colleagues believe there are several possible causes. Since humans (and chimpanzees, for that matter) learn a great deal simply through observation and imitation, children may simply be "learning" violent behaviors when they see…
dmunger | April 12, 2005Yesterday we reported on the general reactions to studies on the impact of media violence. Today we'll get into the specifics of those studies, as reported by Craig Anderson et al. in their report "The Influence of Media Violence on Youth."
The history of research on media violence and its relationship to aggression (behavior intended to cause harm to others) is now more than 50 years long. The earliest studies focused on television and film, but now extensive research has also been conducted on music/music videos, news media, and video games. Nearly all the data from hundreds of studies…
dmunger | April 11, 2005In the summer of 2000, a committee of scholars was commissioned to write a chapter on the effects of media violence on youth for the Surgeon General's Report on Youth Violence, published in January 2001. But their chapter was not included in the Surgeon General's final report. The reason for the omission was unclear; however, there had been disagreement between the report's authors—experts in the field of media and violence—and the Surgeon General's office and the National Institue of Mental Health, regarding whether it was appropriate to include research not directed specifically at criminal…
dmunger | April 9, 2005
(source of original images: Wikipedia. See license)
When my daughter Nora was 15 months old, she had started to pick up a few words. She could say "Mommy," and "Daddy," and "JimmyNO," which is what she called her brother. However, she had only two words for animals: all animals were called either "duck" or "dog." Animals with two legs were ducks, and animals with four legs were dogs. This worked fine, even when her grandparents took her to the zoo. The warthog was a "dog," and so was the giraffe and the zebra. Peacocks, pigeons, and kangaroos were all "ducks" to Nora. The only difficulty…
dmunger | April 6, 2005Listen 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 the second clip so appalling that…
dmunger | April 5, 2005It is well known that humans and other animals can recognize biological motion when shown only a point-light display. Other research has shown that social cues are deeply embedded in our perceptual system. We can also perceive emotions and intentions in simple geometric displays.
So what is going on in our brains while we watch such displays? A team of researchers led by Johannes Schultz found some answers (Johannes Shultz, Hiroshi Imamizu, Mitsuo Kawato, and Chris Frith, "Activation of the Human Superior Temporal Gyrus during Observation of Goal Attribution by Intentional Objects," Journal…
dmunger | April 4, 2005Wine expert Robert Parker claims to be able to distinguish every wine he has ever tasted—10,000 different wines a year—by taste alone. Winemakers can use their sense of smell to detect slight imbalances early in the wine production process that might lead to a spoiled batch. Meanwhile, novices walk the aisles of the typical wine store in a daze, uncertain of which wine to select and unsure whether paying a premium for a "better" vintage is worth the cost. During the German occupation of France, when winemakers were forced to ship their best wines to Hitler's henchmen in Berlin, they poured…
dmunger | April 2, 2005One of the most difficult things for small children to learn is how to take someone else's perspective. If a typical three year old hides a toy when her brother is out of the room, she believes he will know where it is when he returns. By the time they are five, most children will not make this error, and understand that other people have a different perspective on the world than they do. Somewhere around the age of four, children gain the ability to understand that others may believe something to be different from the way they see it themselves. I found an old picture of my kids (who are now…
dmunger | March 31, 2005Early childhood education can often seem like one of the most over-researched fields imaginable. So many parents are so concerned with the fate of their progeny, that it's natural for research to focus on more effective ways to teach kids. Yet the process of learning is also so complex that it can be difficult for studies to come up with conclusive results.
University of Chicago researchers Melissa Singer and Susan Goldin-Meadow have done extensive research on the role of gesture in teaching, finding that teachers spontaneously use gestures to teach, and that the use of gestures increases…
dmunger | March 30, 2005Psychologists and neuroscientists can be said to be working on the same problem, but they tend to approach it from opposite directions. Psychologists generally look at behavior and then try to understand the mental processes that might cause that behavior. Neuroscientists look at brain activity and see how it corresponds to behavior. Then people who are considerably smarter than me try to synthesize the work of both psychologists and neuroscientists in order to come to a complete understanding of how we think and behave.
One piece to add this puzzle is a recent study by Kevin Pelphrey, James…
dmunger | March 28, 2005The NCAA basketball tournament is down to the wire now, with only four teams left. How will the players respond? Will they be able to perform under the incredible pressure from the other teams, the coaches, and most of all, the fans filling in their tournament pool brackets?
Today's headline might be just a tad misleading. While psychologists may not be able to predict the results of the games, they are beginning to develop a better model of what's going on inside highly trained athletes' minds while they play. André Didierjean and Evelyne Marmèche of the Université de Provence just completed…
dmunger | March 24, 2005When we look at a scene, it often seems as if we perceive it all at once. Yet in fact, we are physically able to accurately view only a tiny portion of the scene at a time. Take a look at this image of a human retina (the back of your eyeball). The portion of the eye responsible for accurate vision is the miniscule fovea:
(source: Webvision)
To get a sense of the portion of your visual field you are able to see in clear focus at one time, hold your thumb up at arm's length. The area of the fovea corresponds to the size of your thumbnail at that distance: less than 2 degrees of visual angle!…
dmunger | March 23, 2005When you look at a picture, you are probably generally focused on the central objects, though the overall style might catch your eye. But what about your memory for the background of the picture? Put another way, how accurate are you at recalling the exact borders of a particular view? For that matter, how accurate are you at remembering the borders of the objects depicted in that picture? Carmella Gottesman and Helene Intraub of the University of Delaware were curious about these questions, and so took some special pictures that had objects stacked on objects ("Constraints on spatial…
gmunger | March 21, 2005Have you ever noticed that when you drive by a car whose hazard lights are blinking, something doesn't look quite right? You know those blinking hazard lights are really on the car, but they seem off, somehow. Part of what might be going on is something called the flash-lag effect. Take a look at the movie below, and decide whether or not the blue flashed object is exactly aligned with the end of the gray rod. To start the movie, click on the rod.
In general, it looks as if the blue object is a bit behind the rod; or that the flashed object is lagging relative to the moving rod. This…
dmunger | March 18, 2005Language researchers have long relied on participants suffering from language disorders as a means to better understand how language develops in healthy people. A new special issue of Applied Psycholinguistics covers the study of mental disorders that affect language development. Cognitive Daily will report on a couple of these articles in the coming weeks, so we thought it would be useful to first provide a general overview of some of these disorders, as Mabel L. Rice, Stephen F. Warren, and Stacy K. Betz of the University of Kansas do in their article "Language Symptoms of Developmental…
dmunger | March 16, 2005I'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 that's supposed to mark Leonardo as a…
dmunger | March 15, 2005A few weeks ago, an article appeared in my local newspaper. According to the article, many mothers were beginning to teach their kids sign language, starting at a very young age. Both kids and parents had perfect hearing, but the babies learned sign language even before they could speak, communicating more effectively with their parents about basics like needing a diaper change or a favorite toy. I was immediately skeptical: what about learning spoken language? If babies could communicate effectively with signs, what incentive would they have to learn the language the rest of us speak?
Susan…
dmunger | March 14, 2005With every new generation of violent video game, there seems to be a new outcry about the damage it may be doing to young minds. Yet there has been comparatively little research detailing exactly how video game violence actually corresponds to behavior in the real world. While Grand Theft Auto makes the headlines today, in the early 1990s, Wolfenstein 3D was the violent game of choice. That's when Craig Anderson of the University of Missouri-Columbia and Karen Dill of Lenoir-Rhyne College began the first major study to specifically address the issue of violent video games and aggression ("…
dmunger | March 10, 2005About two weeks ago I engaged in a seemingly pointless exercise in male bonding: I played 24 hours of video games with my son. It turns out, even aside from perfecting my guacamole recipe, the experience may have done me some good.
C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester conducted a study in which they found that avid video game players were better at several different visual tasks compared to non-gamers ("Action Video Game Modifies Visual Attention," Nature, 2003).
I'll get to the specific tasks they studied a little later, because I want to focus in on the really…