Video Games / Technology
dmunger | January 12, 2010Today I had to put off my normal morning run in order to make time to be interviewed on a radio show at 7:30 a.m. As I waited on hold for the interview to start, I could hear the hosts joking back-and-forth about what the "latest TV controversy" is. "Is it the Jay Leno / Conan O'Brien news on NBC?" the host asked? No. Then the hosts rattled through several other hot-button issues on television before arriving at this: "New research from the American Heart Association Journal [Circulation] suggests that watching TV might actually reduce how long you live." How's that for a controversy?
The…
sb admin | January 7, 2010It's football season in America: The NFL playoffs are about to start, and tonight, the elected / computer-ranked top college team will be determined. What better time than now to think about ... baseball! Baseball players, unlike most football players, must solve one of the most complicated perceptual puzzles in sports: how to predict the path of a moving target obeying the laws of physics, and move to intercept it.
The question of how a baseball player knows where to run in order to catch a fly ball has baffled psychologists for decades. (You might argue that a football receiver faces a…
sb admin | January 6, 2010Here's this week's list of notable posts from Psychology and Neuroscience at ResearchBlogging.org.
Is autism really surging? Michelle Dawson wonders whether the recent rise in autism rates can be traced to methodological differences in studies tracking autism rates.
We know many men are attracted to younger women, but what does it mean to look younger? Wayne Hooke looks at a recent study and concludes that looking younger may be a matter of looking less masculine.
Ever had a song that you just can't get out of your head -- an "earworm"? You'd think that psychologists would be all over…
sb admin | December 24, 2009Television can have a huge influence on our lives. But the most important influences may be the ones we don't even notice. I discuss several fascinating studies about television in my latest column on Seedmagazine.com. Here's a snippet:
Travis Saunders, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa who studies the impact of sedentary lifestyles, questions whether a little exercise can make up for hours of inactivity. He refers to a study led by G.F. Dunton of the University of Southern California and published in October in the International Journal of Obesity. The researchers conducted a phone…
dmunger | November 24, 2009Recently a woman had her sick leave benefits based on a diagnosis of clinical depression terminated because of a few pictures she posted on her Facebook page showing her smiling at a birthday party and enjoying a trip to the beach. Was this a fair assessment of her medical condition? Probably not--people with clinical depression can have moments of genuine joy or elation, and even sad people can fake a smile for a photo.
But regardless of whether a few photos posted online are sufficient evidence for a medical diagnosis, there is a larger question: Does a person's online persona match up to…
dmunger | June 18, 2009[Originally posted January, 2007]
Nearly all video games that offer a first-person perspective -- where the view on-screen simulates what a real person would see as she navigates through the virtual environment -- also include a virtual map to help in navigation. Even my favorite golf game has one. Such maps can be indispensable, but they also invite a question -- should the map rotate to align with the player's viewing angle, or should they remain at a constant orientation?
Aligning the map with the viewer's perspective makes it easier to find items, but constantly rotating the map might…
dmunger | May 13, 2009A few weeks ago, a new study made headlines in major newspapers across the country: Study Finds Some Youths 'Addicted' to Video Games, proclaimed the Washington Post. The Post article cited a figure of 8.5 percent of gamers age 8-18 nationwide showing signs of a behavioral addiction. Since the study found that 88 percent of children play video games, the scale of this problem is potentially vast -- as many as 3 million kids, addicted to video games.
The claim of "addiction" is quite serious. Just doing something a lot isn't enough to qualify as an addiction, it must have a detrimental effect…
dmunger | April 13, 2009One of the most controversial topics here on Cognitive Daily is whether playing video games can lead to aggressive behavior or violence -- and one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the impact of violent video games was a 2000 study by Craig Anderson and Karen Dill. In that study, participants played violent or non-violent games, and then were asked to play another "game," this time against what they believed was a real person in a nearby room. In fact, there was no human opponent, and the game was rigged so that the player "won" half the time. The gamers were wearing headphones, and…
dmunger | January 21, 2009There's lots of evidence that most TV isn't beneficial to toddlers, and it may even be harmful. But can't kids learn from TV too? Isn't that supposed to be what shows like Teletubbies, Barney, and Sesame street are all about? For older children, three and above, it does seem to be true that some learning can occur, but for two-year-olds and younger, the evidence tells a different story.
Few studies have shown any evidence that two-year-olds can learn from TV anywhere near as well as they learn from real-world experiences. While they clearly can distinguish between nonsense programming and…
dmunger | November 12, 2008When Jim and Nora were toddlers, they were huge fans of everything Disney. Here they're wearing their Disney pajamas as they play next to their Seven Dwarves figurines, underneath their TV, which was frequently used to watch Disney videos. We even took them to Disney World, where they had an absolute blast, but turned out to be afraid of life-sized Disney characters (but that's a story for another day).
While we didn't let them watch Disney movies whenever they wanted, we did allow it once or twice a week, and even built up a large collection of videos, which we still use to entertain younger…
dmunger | October 9, 2008Take a look at this video:
You may have seen it before -- it's the work of a CGI animation studio that takes the motions of human actors and turns them into animated models, giving them the ability to put incredibly realistic figures in impossible situations, like on Mars, or swimming in lava, or whatever an animator can conceive of.
But the advent of realistic simulations such as this makes it clear that people need to be more aware than ever of the potential for digital fraud. We now have email spam, but in the future we might have similar computerized instant messaging spam, or even video…
dmunger | October 1, 2008When Jim was 12 or 13, he seemed to want to watch almost every R-rated movie that came out. PG-13 movies were okay, and PG and G-rated movies were beneath his dignity. Was he simply interested in these movies because they were forbidden (as we contended), or was he somehow more drawn to the content of movies that happened to carry an R rating (as he insisted)?
To further complicate matters, there are separate ratings systems for TV, movies, video games, music, and even web sites. With such an array of ratings systems, are parents actually aware of what each rating means?
There's been…
dmunger | September 11, 2008One big problem with many of the studies of video game violence is that they compare different games. Sure, people might behave more aggressively after playing Carmaggeddon instead of Tetris -- they're completely different games! What would be more impressive is if we could simply remove some of the violence from a game and see if the violence itself -- rather than, say, the game's storyline -- is what's actually the root of the aggressive behavior.
Fortunately, the standard settings of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance allowed a team led by Christopher Barlett to do just that.
They had avid…
dmunger | July 17, 2008When we're in a crowded space, making visual judgments becomes more difficult. But it doesn't take much to trigger a crowding effect. Clicking on the picture below will take you to a quick movie (QuickTime required) that should demonstrate the effect. Focus on the cross to the left, then start the movie (it may start automatically, depending on your browser). In two seconds, a "T" will flash briefly on the right side of the screen. Your job is to determine whether the T is upright or inverted (upside-down). After another two seconds, three Ts will appear. This time, you must judge only the…
dmunger | July 7, 2008Last year we discussed a great deal of research about the gender disparity in math and science. Even while women are more successful overall in school than men, in certain fields there is a very large deficit in the number of women participating. We mentioned one explanation in particular:
The male math advantage in a number of different studies appears to be directly related to visuospatial skills, the most important being mental rotation. In tests on calculation or other mathematical problems that don't require visuospatial skills, females perform just as well as -- or better than -- males…
dmunger | June 30, 2008In our discussions of violence associated with video game play, we've frequently noted that there appear to be different effects depending on the type of video game. Some games are more violent than others, and some games reward violence while others discourage it. All this has an impact in terms of real-world behavior and attitudes. Some games have positive effects.
One type of game -- one of the most popular types, in fact -- hasn't been studied nearly as much as the traditional arcade-style game: massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. One of the studies of this type…
dmunger | April 24, 2008Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even to torture animals. Over 85 percent of video games include violence.
When these statistics are combined with the results of studies showing that aggressive attitudes and even actions can be increased after playing violent games for as little as 20 minutes, it's possible that we have a major problem on our hands.
Another potential problem of video…
dmunger | March 26, 2008[This article was originally published in January of 2007]
Many many studies have repeatedly shown the dangers of driving while using a cell phone. Yesterday, while discussing a new law in Britain imposing heavy penalties not only for driving using a handheld phone, but also while using phones with hands-free kits, commenter Jan claimed that talking to a passenger was less dangerous than talking on a phone. I replied that I hadn't seen a study demonstrating that talking with passengers was any different from talking on a phone, and Jan provided a link to one such study.
Greta and I have both…
cogdaily | June 19, 2007[originally posted on April 20, 2006]
If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there…
cogdaily | June 7, 2007This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
How well do you think you can navigate through these woods?
How about when your field of view is significantly reduced?
When external information such as sight is decreased, our ability to make our way to a goal while avoiding obstacles will understandably be impaired.But when we lose all visual information we can still make mental representations, or "mental maps" of our surroundings. Even blind individuals compare with those who can see in tasks such as recreating large scale representations of…