May 16, 2008
Category: Casual Fridays
Greta and I have very different approaches to technology. I like to read all the latest technology news and learn about new products; she just buys the products she needs. That's not to say she doesn't like technology: she has a lab full of computers and uses them extensively in her research. We've also found that we have different quirks about how we use technology, like how we organize our desks and who we'll let use our stuff.
That got us wondering if there are any patterns to people's technology quirks. Are technophiles less likely to let other people play with their toys, for example? So, naturally, we've prepared a short survey for you, to see if we can find any commonalities in the ways people use technology.
Click here to participate
There are just 16 questions, so the survey should only take a couple minutes to complete. There is no limit on the number of respondents.
Since Greta and I will be out of town next week, you have until Thursday, May 29 to respond. Then don't forget to check back on Friday, May 30 for the results!
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:02 PM • Comments (15)
May 15, 2008
Category: Perception • Research
This morning I went into the darkest room in our house (the kids' bathroom), closed the door, and turned off the lights for 5 minutes. There was enough light coming in through the crack in the door that after a minute or two I could begin to make out shapes in the room: A towel rack, the shower curtain. My eyes had adapted to the dark condition. Then I closed my right eye and covered it with my hand. I turned the lights back on, for a minute, until my left eye had adapted to the light. Then I turned the lights off.
I could still see the towel rack and shower curtain with my right eye, which remained adapted to darkness. But my left eye could see nothing. In fact, my left eye felt as if it was closed. I made every effort to open the eye, but it seemed that some unstoppable force was keeping it closed. The only way to make my eye feel as if it was open was to cover it with my hand. I still couldn't see anything with the eye, but at least I could convince myself it was open.
What I was experiencing was a fascinating illusion discovered by Uta Wolfe and her colleagues. When one eye is adapted to darkness and the other is not, then in a dark room, the light-adapted eye will feel as if it is at least partially closed. You can try it out for yourself, just as I did (You might want to bring an iPod [with screen dimmed] or some other form of non-visual entertainment -- five minutes in the dark is a long time!). I'll include a poll later on so we can see if our readers experienced the effect.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 9:11 AM • Comments (18)
May 13, 2008
Category: Development / Aging • Movement and exercise • Research
Jim was an early, confident walker. Greta likes to say that he didn't learn to walk, he went straight to running. By the time he was about 16 months old, he could already outrun his already-pregnant mother.
Nora, on the other hand, was a late, tentative walker. She took her first steps at around 12 months, and still wasn't very confident as a walker at 18 months. In this photo, at 17 months, she still clings to their toy kitchen set for balance.
But I've just finished reading a fascinating study suggesting that at 14 months, when both of them were walking -- Jim with confidence, and Nora struggling -- they actually took a similar approach to balance while walking.
A team led by Jessie Garciaguirre might be the first to investigate how infants who've only recently learned to walk adapt to carrying heavy loads. Adults generally carry no more than 35 percent of their own body weight (though in some African tribes, women balance immense loads -- up to 70 percent of their body weight -- on their heads). School-age kids might port 20-30 percent of body weight in backpacks on their way to school. Adults and kids make significant adjustments to posture and gait when bearing loads in excess of 15 percent of body weight. They take shorter steps, and they lean away from the load to compensate (generally this means leaning forward to accommodate a backpack).
So why not put backpacks on toddlers and see how they manage? Garciaguirre and Karen Adolph had previously found that 14-month-olds fall down an average of 15 times per hour while playing. What could possibly go wrong when heavy weights are strapped to their backs?
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:09 PM • Comments (4)
May 12, 2008
Category: Memory • Perception • Research
We're pretty good at remembering objects in a complex scene. We can even remember those objects when we move to a different location. However, the research so far has found that memory for the original view is a little better than memory when we've moved to a different location. Much of that research, however, has focused on relatively complex movements: Viewers are asked to remember an array of objects viewed from one side of a room, then are transported to a different part of the room and asked to decide whether the objects are arranged in the same pattern (actually, they're sitting at a computer watching static images, but the camera has moved).
This sort of motion actually encompasses two separate motions: translation and rotation. For example, in this crude figure representing a room, a viewer moving from the bottom to the right-hand side of the room would have to not only walk to a different part of the room, but also rotate his body (or at least his head) to see the objects in the room.
So what about simpler forms of motion? Do translating and rotating alone affect memory for the arrangement of objects in a scene? Rotating is difficult to assess independently, since if you rotate your body too much, you're no longer viewing the scene. But David Waller was able to consider two different types of translation in scenes: backwards and forwards, and side-to-side.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:09 PM • Comments (6)
May 10, 2008
Category: Casual Fridays
Things got a little crazy yesterday, with Greta headed off to VSS and the kids needing to be at three different places at once, so I'm presenting this week's Casual Friday results on Saturday.
Last week we asked our readers who their most important mentors were. We didn't mention it at the time, but the survey was inspired by the headlines that week about Barack Obama's pastor's seemingly unpatriotic sermons, and how those sermons reflected on Obama. Do pastors really have a huge influence on people's lives? Can we actually evaluate a presidential candidate based on something his pastor says?
By asking our readers who their most important mentors are, we thought we might get a better picture of what the actual role of a mentor is. Of course, our readers might not have the same religious background as the average American, so we also asked about religious preferences. Here are the results:
Less than a quarter of our respondents indicated being a part of a monotheistic religion, and almost 60 percent say they are atheist or agnostic. A quick search online shows that result to be dramatically different from the American population, which is generally reported to be about 85 percent Christian and less than 1 percent atheist/agnostic. Nonetheless, as a highly educated law-school graduate, Obama could be considered to be more like our readers than the general population, so perhaps our results do have some relevance for how we might expect his pastor to influence him. So let's take a look at who our readers think their most important mentors are.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:07 PM • Comments (13)
May 8, 2008
Category: Memory • Research • Social
Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.
How much is Anton to blame for the accident? If you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe you'd give him a 7. After all, he was just trying to do something special for his parents.
But what if instead of hiding an anniversary present, Anton was rushing home to hide his cocaine stash? Would you now say he's more to blame for the accident? You might not when the two alternatives are placed side-by-side, but when Mark Alicke told the two versions of this story to different groups, the cocaine group rated Anton as more blameworthy than the anniversary present group.
Alicke's study provided the foundation for an array of studies on the effects of social evaluations of individuals on apparently unrelated events, and even factual recollections about episodes.
But when a team led by David Pizarro addressed this question, no study had yet shown that unrelated details about a person could literally affect witnesses' accuracy in recalling that person's actions. The researchers presented a simple story to 283 college students. The story described a person named Frank entering a restaurant, paying with cash for a drink, then ordering a three-course meal, receiving a cell phone call, and leaving without paying the $56.43 bill.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:47 PM • Comments (14)
May 7, 2008
Category: Development / Aging • Reasoning • Research • Social
Ask almost anyone whether willfully deceiving another person -- lying -- is wrong, and they'll say it is. But probe a little deeper and most people will say there are some instances where lying is okay: lying to prevent a crime or an injustice is acceptable, just not lying for personal gain. Parents teach their kids that lying is wrong, and punish them for telling lies.
I can still remember the shock when my parents "lied" about my sixth birthday (which was a day away) at an ice-cream parlor so I could get a free sundae. But eventually, at some point, most American kids end up telling lies to their parents, as did I -- I just can't remember any of them at the moment (honest!).
Clearly children's conceptions of "acceptable" lies change over time. There must be a time in early childhood where they don't understand what a lie is. Then they learn what a lie is, followed shortly by learning that a lying is wrong. But how do they move from this stage to the more nuanced moral assessment of lying held by most adults?
Serena Perkins and Elliot Turiel came up with six situations in which lying might be justified, then asked 64 teens aged 12 to 17 which ones were acceptable and which were not. The situations are below:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:05 PM • Comments (10)
May 5, 2008
Category: Music • Research
If you've had a lot of musical training, you can probably tell the difference between a major and minor key. If you haven't had much training, even after having the difference explained to you, you're still not likely to be able to make that determination. Listen the following clip. It plays the same melody in a major and a minor key. Can you tell which is which?
But if the question is phrased differently, even non-musicians can reliably tell the difference: When listeners are told that some music (which happens to be in a major key) sounds "happy" and other music (in a minor key) sounds "sad," non-musicians can pick out the difference. With that information in mind, do you want to change your answer about the two samples above? If you do, you're probably a non-musician. If you don't, you either got lucky in your answer, or you are a musician. Either way, it's clear that musicians process "major" and "minor" differently from non-musicians. So what's different about the mental processing of musicians and non-musicians?
A team led by Andrea Halpern created 35 short tunes like the clips above. Each tune was then modified to have a minor-key and major-key variant -- this involved changing just a few notes in each tune. Then three expert musicians rated each clip for musicality and how "major" or "minor" each clip sounded. The 24 best examples of tunes with readily-identifiable major and minor keys were selected for study.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:22 PM • Comments (21)
Category: General / Site news
Last week's post on perceptual restoration in toddlers brought a lot of speculation from commenters. To answer some of the questions, I thought I'd elaborate a bit here on the phenomenon and how I created the demo.
First, here's the original recording again, with me saying "dinosaur" three times:
In the first case, I edited out the "s" sound, and everyone with normal hearing can hear that. The last "dinosaur" is complete. Did I edit out the "s" in the middle dinosaur?
Most adults believe they hear the "s" sound in cases like this, even if the sound has been edited out: the perceptual system adds in a sound where it doesn't exist.
Indeed, more than half of the respondents to our poll said they had heard an "s" sound, even though in fact the sound was edited out in the second "dinosaur."
But some commenters speculated that an "s" sound was embedded in the sneeze sound effect I created, thus nullifying the effect. The "sneeze" was actually a composite of a fake cough and a fake sneeze (neither sounded realistic enough on its own). Do you hear an "s" in either of these sounds?
Personally I'm not hearing it, but I agree that it's closer to an "s" sound than other sounds I could have inserted. In fact the authors of the study do point out that perceptual restoration doesn't always occur; it's less likely to occur when the inserted sound is less like the sound it replaces. As a demonstration, I've redone the demo below, using a horn sound instead of a sneeze:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 11:54 AM • Comments (2)
May 2, 2008
Category: Casual Fridays
This week's Casual Friday is about mentors. We're curious who constitutes the most important influence on our readers, and whether we can identify any patterns in the results. So we've created a brief study that we hope will answer our questions. Simple as that.
Click here to participate
There are just a few questions, so the survey should only take a couple minutes to complete. There is no limit on the number of respondents. You have until Thursday, May 8 to respond. Then don't forget to check back on Friday, May 9 for the results!
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:39 PM • Comments (9)
May 1, 2008
Category: Development / Aging • Language • Research
One of the amazing things about learning language is that children rarely hear language sounds in ideal acoustic environments. Maybe other people are talking in the background, or the dishwasher is running, or the TV is on. Yet somehow children they learn words just the same. By the time we're adults, we've become experts at filtering out irrelevant sounds and patching together meaning out of the cacophony of everyday life.
As one example, listen to this short clip of me saying the word "dinosaur" three times.
I edited the "s" sound out of the first "dinosaur," so you can clearly hear me saying "dino_aur." The last "dinosaur" is obviously complete. But what about the middle "dinosaur," where I edited in a cough/sneeze right over where the "s" sound is supposed to be? Can you still hear the "s" in the background? Let's make this a poll:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:00 PM • Comments (18)
April 30, 2008
Category: News
The man behind the amazing Contrast Asynchrony illusion has started a blog! Arthur Shapiro tells me he has a backlog of literally thousands of illusions. He promises to offer a new illusion every week, along with an explanation of the science behind it. Here's a preview of this week's illusion:
For an explanation of how it works, you'll have to visit Shapiro's blog, Illusion Sciences. There are already three illusions posted, with plenty more to come.
Arthur Shapiro is a world-class illusion designer and psychologist whose illusions have won the most prestigious awards in the field. Two illusions from his lab are among this year's top ten illusions.
Posted by Dave Munger at 10:05 AM • Comments (3)
April 29, 2008
Category: Face perception • Memory • Research • Social
Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa.
But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? Is learning to recognize other races as difficult as recognizing any new category of objects -- cars, say, or birds? When we do learn to recognize other-race faces, do we really know them as well as more familiar races?
While it has been known for some time that we can learn to recognize other race faces as well as our own, this last question hasn't been studied as thoroughly. Maybe in more difficult tests of recognition, we wouldn't do as well with different-race faces.
To explore this question, a team led by Elinor McKone developed a clever set of three experiments. In the first experiment, white Australian students were exposed to 32 different faces -- some white, and some Asian -- for three seconds each. After a brief break where they were distracted with multiplication problems, they were tested on a set of 64 pictures -- 32 they had seen before, and 32 new pictures. Their job was to say which were old and which were new. As expected, the students were significantly more accurate with same-race faces compared to different-race faces. This showed that with brief exposure, different-race faces aren't recognized as well as same-race faces.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:17 PM • Comments (15)
April 28, 2008
Category: News
Thank you for "choosing" to read Encephalon #44 here at Cognitive Daily. Every two weeks, Encephalon "selects" the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere, giving readers the chance to "decide" which ones they'd like to investigate further.
Unfortunately for all those involved, those "decisions" very likely weren't carried out through the "deciders'" own volition, but instead were precipitated through the confluence of genetic inheritance and circumstance.
Consider this post from Neuroanthropology, for example, which dissects a forthcoming publication in Nature Neuroscience indicating that brain activity predicting a decision occurs prior to the actual decision. Do we decide, or do our brains decide for us? If your predetermined fate moves you to read this post, you will find out.
Suppose we don't have free will and in fact are controlled by our brains. Then if the Department of Defense designs brain-controlled weapons, then who's really going to war -- us or our brains? Those so fated can entertain this question at Mind Hacks.
But once we start to believe that we have no free will, won't that, too, affect our actions? If coincidence leads you to Cognitive Daily, you can find the answer.
I wasn't predestined to understand this post, but since it includes the word "determinism," I think it might also have something to do with the free-will/determinism issue. Perhaps your nature/nurture combo made you better-equipped to understand Jonathan Pratt's point. If so, I suggest you read the post.
Except to the extent that everything you do is a manifestation of your free will (or predetermined behavior), the remaining posts in this edition of Encephalon have nothing to do with the free will / determinism debate. Undaunted, I have collected them below:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 12:51 PM • Comments (6)
April 27, 2008
Category: News
CogDaily will be hosting Encephalon tomorrow. There's still time to make your submissions -- just send an email to encephalon.host -- @ -- gmail -- . -- com (remove dashes).
We should be able to include any submissions received before 9 a.m. tomorrow.
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:31 PM • Comments (0)
April 26, 2008
Category: News
There's a fun little test over at the BBC: Spot the fake smile (via Green Ideas).
Try to spot the difference between fake smiles and real smiles! I got 17 out of 20. It helps to understand the research about authentic smiles.
Update: Now I'm curious. I wonder if our readers are really that good, or if people are only posting their scores when they do well, so -- I've added a poll, below the fold.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 8:28 AM • Comments (47)
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
