Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
June 6, 2006
A new longitudinal study suggests that playing online role playing games can help kids prepare for the world of adult responsibility:
Young players who become members of a clan, guild or faction (terminology depends on the game) find they have responsibilities to attend to if they wish to receive…
June 6, 2006
The Eide Neurolearning Blog reports on research suggesting that it's more difficult for highly anxious people to recognize happy facial expressions.
The original research article, by Leah Somerville and colleagues, can be found here.
June 5, 2006
A new study on mice offers some evidence of the mechanism that causes us to be sleepy after we eat. The research was conducted by a team led by Denis Burdakov:
In their experiments, the researchers engineered mice to produce a fluorescent protein only in orexin neurons. Thus, the researchers could…
June 5, 2006
I've been an avid skier for over 25 years -- but I didn't start using goggles until very recently. Under the overcast Washington State skies, they didn't seem to be necessary. But now that I live in North Carolina, skiing is usually done under sunny skies on artificial snow; goggles are a must. As…
June 5, 2006
I have a review of The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis up at The Quarterly Conversation. You might want to give it a look. Here's an excerpt:
At current count, several recent books, documentaries, and even an IMAX film have covered Ernest Shackleton's now legendary failed attempt to be the first…
June 2, 2006
The Washington Post reports on the decline of school recess periods:
For many kids today, the recess bell comes too late, for too little time, or even not at all. Pressure to raise test scores and adhere to state-mandated academic requirements is squeezing recess out of the school day. In many…
June 1, 2006
Several studies indicate that the brain regions responsible for taste overlap the areas responsible for detecting pain.
However, Dana Small and A. Vania Apkarian noted that little research has been conducted on the relationship to taste sensitivity and pain. They developed a simple experiment to…
June 1, 2006
Cog News has an article about new research on the incidence of face blindness.
"Until a few years ago, only 100 cases of prosopagnosia had been documented worldwide, but it now appears the condition is much less rare than had previously been assumed," says Nakayama, the Edgar Pierce Professor of…
May 31, 2006
Courtney Martin makes an interesting argument about the phenomenon she calls The Paradox of the Perfect Girl. It's the result of the recent upsurge of girls outperforming boys academically:
The perfect girl is everywhere. She is your niece, your daughter, your friend's genius kid. She is the girl…
May 31, 2006
Roy Behrens has created a fascinating site analyzing the relationship between Gestalt psychology, cubism, and camoflage used on ships in World War I.
In recent years, it has been verified that prominent French camoufleurs during World War I were consciously, willingly influenced by cubist methods…
May 30, 2006
According to an article in the New York Times, names of companies that are easier to pronounce lead to higher stock prices.
The researchers ... tested name complexity and the performance of real initial public offerings listed on the New York and American Stock Exchanges. A $1,000 investment in a…
May 30, 2006
A recent study about violence and sex in TV advertising got a fair amount of press. "Violence and sex don't sell," the headlines proclaimed. If such a claim is true, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the blusterings of ad agencies worldwide.
Advertisers have always used the idea that…
May 30, 2006
When he was a toddler, our son Jim was entranced by Barney the Dinosaur. He'd watch the program for an uninterrupted 30 minutes each day, giving exhausted parents a much-needed chance for a rest, while Jimmy learned important skills such as counting and letters. While the rest was welcome, our…
May 29, 2006
This week's "Ask a Scienceblogger question" is:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
NO!
The public isn't qualified to determine whether research is…
May 29, 2006
Interesting article in the Washington Post about video game addiction in South Korea (via Slashdot). From the article:
An estimated 2.4 percent of the population from 9 to 39 are believed to be suffering from game addiction, according to a government-funded survey. Another 10.2 percent were found…
May 26, 2006
Take a look at the following movie. Your job is to identify which ball appeared to make the noise in the final frame. (click to play):
If this seems confusing now, it should be cleared up by the end of this post. You can register your result in this poll:
Synesthesia, as we've discussed before…
May 26, 2006
Chris Chatham has an excellent summary of a talk by University of Chicago neurologist / mathematician Jack Cowan, who has come up with a mathematical explanation of a variety of common hallucinations.
The development of orientation and spatial frequency maps in V1 [a region of the brain which maps…
May 25, 2006
Japanese researchers have found a way to use a human brain image to control a robot.
While this isn't exactly "mind control" -- the human still has to physically move his body in order to create the proper brain image, it's a fascinating example of how things might work in the future. There are…
May 24, 2006
We've discussed implicit attitudes on Cognitive Daily before, but never in the context of food. The standard implicit attitude task asks you to identify items belonging to two different categories. Consider the following lists. Use your mouse to click on items which are either pleasant or related…
May 22, 2006
We've had plenty of discussion of the Stroop Effect on Cognitive Daily, and a cool effect it is -- but it's not the only effect with a catchy name. How about the spatial numerical association of response codes effect? Not catchy enough for you? The scholars researching the effect have taken to…
May 19, 2006
The Stroop Effect was originally just a language effect: we're slower identifying the color text is printed in when the words themselves name different colors. In the 81 years since the effect was first observed, it's been applied to a variety of very different phenomena. In general, the effect is…
May 18, 2006
Take a look at this photo:
What emotion would you say I'm expressing here? Let's make this one a poll (make sure you answer before you read any farther):
In 1872, Charles Darwin argued that facial expressions must have evolved just as surely as eyes or noses (you can read an excerpt from his work…
May 18, 2006
My article The Economics of Conservation is up on seedmagazine.com. The article discusses the clash over global warming, and how economists and climatologists deal with the uncertainty inherent in each of their disciplines. It was an interesting article to write -- I got to talk with a number of…
May 17, 2006
This week's Ask a Scienceblogger question is "will the "human" race still be around in 100 years?"
The short answer is yes.
The slightly longer answer is this: we could face a number of catastrophes, including a pandemic, massive global warming, nuclear war, or all of the above. Our numbers could…
May 16, 2006
The text below will bring up an animation. Just look at it once -- no cheating! A picture will flash for about a quarter of a second, followed by a color pattern for a quarter second. Then the screen will go blank for about one second, and four objects will appear. Use the poll below to indicate…
May 15, 2006
Every so often on Cognitive Daily, someone will post a comment asking for help on a paper they're writing for school. It's pretty clear where these people come from: they've done a Google search on video games or whatever it is that interests them, and our post is the first thing they've found that…
May 12, 2006
Some site news:
Now that summer is upon us, Casual Fridays is going to take a little hiatus. Don't worry, it will be back next fall, but it's pretty much impossible for us to keep Casual Fridays going in the summer since we'll be traveling quite a bit. We can schedule regular posts in advance, but…
May 12, 2006
When our son Jim "graduated" from preschool, there was a very formal ceremony, complete with little caps and gowns. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), we had already planned a trip to Disneyworld for the same dates. Forced to choose between Disney and sitting through a…
May 10, 2006
Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One…
May 9, 2006
The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you…