Research
dmunger | March 9, 2005Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are lawyers,
Our dads are CEOs.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!
Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein wrote "Officer Krupke" in 1956 as a brilliant satire of contemporary research suggesting that poor kids were more likely to develop psychological problems than middle-class kids. The joke in West Side Story was, the poor kids themselves were the ones singing the song, suggesting that they were aware that the implication that their behavior was somehow society's fault…
dmunger | March 8, 2005Have you ever played around with point-light displays? If not, take a few moments to explore the amazing site I've linked. Through these simple animated displays, we can detect gender, emotion, even species. Point-light displays have been studied for decades as a way to understand how we perceive biological motion. Even pigeons, quail, and cats appear to recognize animals when they are shown point-light displays.
You might think the simple fact that other animals can also recognize these displays suggests that perception of biological motion is "hard-wired" into our brains—and it is indeed a…
dmunger | March 4, 2005The world of someone who has a psychological disorder is different from the world of a healthy person. For example, someone suffering from clinical anxiety will notice threatening stimuli sooner, and an alcoholic will perceive alcohol-related images quicker than healthy people. These different perceptions of the world exacerbate the illness, making recovery even more difficult.
But what about casual users of alcohol, or occasional users of marijuana? Is their world different too? A group of researchers led by Harry T. Jones of the University of Glasgow devised an experiment to test this…
dmunger | March 2, 2005Take 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 it by two degrees at each point along…
dmunger | March 1, 2005When you were a child, did you ever bend over and look between your legs to see what the world looked like upside down? If you were like me, you were disappointed: for me, anyways, the world didn't look as different as I had hoped. Though turning things upside down does make it more difficult to get around, we're actually quite good at adapting to changing our head position. You can do an experiment to see just how good you are at it. Fix your eyes on an object ten feet or so away. Now tilt your head to the left and to the right. Does it appear as if the image is tilting back and forth as you…
dmunger | February 28, 2005One of the most famous perceptual demos is the ambiguous image or "bi-stable figure" of a duck - rabbit:
(source: curiouser.co.uk)
As presented, it looks like a duck, but rotated to the right, it suddenly "transforms" into a rabbit. There are also images that can transform simply based on how you look at them. Artists like Eshcher were fascinated by such images, but it was Salvador Dali who took the phenomenon to the next level with paintings like Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire:
(source: Artchive)
It's worth checking out the image on the Artchive site because you can…
dmunger | February 25, 2005Aristotle wrote that drama must be guided by three principles, the Unities. All aspects of a good play must take place in the same location, within a short time period, and contribute to a single plot. Otherwise, forced to stretch their imagination, the audience wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief, and the play would cease to be a reasonable imitation of reality. The ideal play would take place over the same amount of time it took to perform (say, two hours), would be set in the same place, and would have a single course of action.
It is indeed an interesting feat when a play or a film…
dmunger | February 24, 2005Literary theory is being influenced more and more by research in cognitive psychology, and as the previous article I discussed showed, psychology research is also influenced by theory. Today's article, "Generating Predictive Inferences While Viewing a Movie" (Joseph P. Magliano, Northern Illinois University, and Katinka Dijkstra and Rolf A. Zwaan, Florida State University, in Discourse Processes, 1996), is another example.
In much film theory, the key techniques used to tell a story are mise en scène, montage, cinematography, and sound. Mise en scène is everything used to create the set,…
dmunger | February 17, 2005Most schools of literary criticism suggest that it's fruitless to attempt to consider what the intentions of the author are; we can only examine the "text" itself: it is the only solid evidence we have. Similarly, critics toss up their hands when trying to comprehend the experience of the reader of a text. While the notion of "author" becomes even more complex when we consider film, examining the experience of the film viewer does seem to be attainable: since films are experienced in real time, we can compare the experiences of different viewers while they watch the same portions of a film.…
dmunger | February 16, 2005A couple weeks back on my personal blog, I posted a rant about Marshall McLuhan. Basically I was arguing that while the medium may be the message, the medium isn't the only message. There was a fair bit of commentary on my post, both there at Word Munger and around the blogosphere. As expected, I don't think I changed many minds—"believing" McLuhan's argument seems to be more a matter of faith than anything else.
It turns out, psychologists have something to say about all this. There is plenty of psychological research on art, but as you might expect, most of this work is done in labs, not…
dmunger | February 14, 2005Today's reading is "Artists as Experts in Visual Cognition," by Aaron Kozbelt of the University of Chicago (Visual Cognition, 2001).
We need to incorporate many skills in order to make visual sense of the world. We must be able to discern objects even when we have incomplete visual information, pick out shapes from complex environments, and mentally rotate images to compare them with other images. All these phenomena have been measured by psychologists, and they have found that different individuals have varying degrees of skill at them.
What kind of people are best at these visual skills?…
dmunger | February 10, 2005How do we tell where an object is in a three-dimensional world when our eye only gives us two dimensions worth of information? Today's reading ("Moving Cast Shadows Induce Apparent Motion in Depth" by Daniel Kersten, Pascal Mamassian, and David Knill of the University of Minnesota [Perception, 1997]) explores one aspect of that question: the role of an object's shadow.
Video game designers faced this issue in the 1980s when they began attempting to make "3-D" arcade games. One classic example was the game Zaxxon, where you flew a spaceship diagonally across the screen. The trick was, you not…
dmunger | February 4, 2005Today's reading is "Prior Knowledge on the Illlumination Position" by Pascal Mamassian and Ross Goutcher of the University of Glasgow (Cognition, 2001 [PDF link]).
When we see an embossed seal such as a notary stamp, how do we know which parts are convex (bumps) and which are concave (dimples)? When we look at such a seal through a microscope (or even a toilet paper roll), so that we don't know where the illumination is coming from, we can't tell what's up and what's down. This effect was first recorded in 1744, and first accurately explained in 1786 by David Rittenhouse: we assume the light…
dmunger | February 1, 2005Today's reading is "When Sound Affects Vision: Effects of Auditory Grouping on Visual Motion Perception," by Katsumi Watanabe and Shinsuke Shimojo of Caltech (Psychological Science, 2001).
In 1997, Sekuler, Sekuler, and Lau discovered a fascinating effect that I've attempted to replicate using the crude resources available to me (iMovie). I've made two movies (quicktime required) that (perhaps with a little imagination) replicate the effect. First watch movie 1:
movie 1
It looks like the two balls pass through each other, right?
Now, make sure you have the sound turned up on your computer and…
dmunger | January 30, 2005How do we see things in color? How do we know objects stay the same color when the color of the light they reflect changes as the lighting changes? We see this effect most dramatically in the theater, where the stage lights cover every color of the rainbow, yet we still know the heroine is wearing a purple dress and our hero has majestic blonde hair.
In today's reading ("Surface-Illuminant Ambiguity and Color Constancy: Effects of Scene Complexity and Depth Cues" by James M. Kraft, Shannon I. Maloney, and David H. Brainard of UC-Santa Barbara [Perception, 2002]), the authors explore some of…
dmunger | January 26, 2005Today's reading delves deep into the visual system, so hold your breath and get ready to dive in. It's "Sound-aided Recover from and Persistence Against Visual Filling-in" by Bhavin Sheth and Shinsuke Shimojo of Caltech (Vision Research, 2004). I even found a PDF link for this one.
Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler (1780--1866) was a Swiss physician and philosopher who discovered a simple visual effect that continues to be studied today. Because his work generates so much research interest, there is even a Web site devoted to his life and work. The effect he discovered is aptly named "Troxler fading"…
dmunger | January 24, 2005Today's reading is "The Influence of Head Contour and Nose Angle on the Perception of Eye-Gaze Direction" by Stephen Langton, Helen Honeyman, and Emma Tessler, of University of Stirling (Perception and Psychophysics, 2004).
We're exceptionally good at telling where someone is looking, and we're even better at determining whether they're looking at us. We can quickly spot someone looking straight at us in a crowd of others who are looking away (I hereby dub this the "singles club effect"), and we can discern gaze deviations of as little as 1.4 degrees in people sitting close by.
How do we make…
dmunger | January 20, 2005Today's reading is "Musical Soundtracks as a Schematic Influence on the Cognitive Processing of Filmed Events," by Marilyn G. Boltz of Haverford College (Music Perception, Summer 2001).
All film is illusion. The illusion of motion is created by a sequence of static frames. The illusion of a three-dimensional world is created by a two-dimensional photograph. What role does music play in maintaining that illusion? A big one, it turns out. Marshall and Cohen (1988) found that by showing cartoons where the only "characters" were a triangle, a circle, and a square, changing the music could change…