Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
March 29, 2006
Take a look at the QuickTime movie below. It will show a still image for 10 seconds, then a blank screen. Then it will show you the image again. Your job is to look for a detail that has been changed between the two images.
Most people have difficulty with this task. Even when the part that…
March 27, 2006
Take a look at these two shapes. Which appears more "joyful"? Which appears fearful?
How about these shapes? Which is angrier? Which appears to be suffering more?
If you're like most people, the shapes that appear to be less stable (number 2 in the figures above) are also more fearful. Those…
March 24, 2006
One of my pet peeves is when I respond carefully to someone's email and they don't notice that I've addressed several points in one message. They seem to only read the first sentence or two and then move on.
This has made me curious as to how others handle important email messages to make sure…
March 24, 2006
We received quite a few complaints about last week's Casual Fridays study, most of them centered around our scientifically inaccurate eye exam. In our defense, the Snellen chart is only designed to be a rough measure of visual acuity. General practitioners use it as a first-pass to determine if…
March 23, 2006
What's it like to have all your memories erased? Well, not all your memories, because if that happened, you'd simply be like a newborn infant, and you'd have to relearn everything. The more interesting scenario is to lose only certain memories -- the memories that most people think of as "true"…
March 21, 2006
What's the best way to ensure that law enforcement officers don't abuse their authority and coerce innocent suspects into confessing? Yesterday we discussed research suggesting that a side-view videotape of a confession was more likely than a head-on view to result in an accurate assessment of…
March 20, 2006
College student Bradley Page dropped his girlfriend off in a park one evening, only to learn later that she had been murdered and buried in a shallow grave. Police investigating the death interviewed him about the incident, repeatedly asking him why he could have left her alone in that park. "It…
March 17, 2006
Our son Jim doesn't like wearing his glasses, so we got him contacts. Then we found out that he wasn't wearing his contacts, so about a month ago we made him start wearing his glasses again. Today at our parent-teacher-student conference, his English teacher remarked that today was the first time…
March 17, 2006
Last week's Casual Friday study attracted the most e-mails and questions we've ever received. It also attracted the largest number of responses ever: we cut it off at 400, before our Surveymonkey bill got too large (this is probably thanks mostly to our mention in the Seed Daily Zeitgeist on Monday…
March 16, 2006
A Witches' Bible states that "the sensitive is psychically aware of character qualities, or emotional or spiritual states, in the subject, and this awareness presents itself to him or her as visual phenomena." It's easy to dismiss such claims as pseudoscientific claptrap, yet there exist humans who…
March 14, 2006
If my twentieth high school reunion last year was any indication, we seem to hang on to the music we listened to as adolescents longer than any other time period. Everyone was dancing to "Purple Rain" and "Rock Lobster" like the music written in 1984 was the best ever written. A 1996 study…
March 13, 2006
In case you're reading Cognitive Daily on RSS or don't always check out the links to the (generally very good) seedmagazine.com articles in the column just to the right of this blog, I did want to point you to an article I wrote for them about peer review.
One of the things we like to do on…
March 10, 2006
This week's Casual Friday study requires participants to be unaware of its purpose. It's nothing insiduous, just a quick survey that should, as usual, take no more than a minute of your time. We do think it's a clever little experiment, so we hope you'll participate, even knowing nothing of its…
March 10, 2006
Does being a movie expert make you a better predictor of the Oscar winners? Comedy Central pundit parodist Stephen Colbert claims that he made his oscar predictions without having seen any of the movies, but then went 5 for 5, even predicting the upset of the year, Crash, to win best picture. If…
March 9, 2006
We've reported on studies about cell phones and driving before. A general consensus has formed that driving with cell phones (even hands-free phones) is dangerous. What matters most, it appears, isn't so much the physical aspect -- holding and operating the phone -- but how demanding the…
March 7, 2006
The Prisoner's Dilemma is an ethical conundrum that's been used for years by psychologists, economists, and philosophers to explore human behavior. The basic scenario is this: two criminals have been captured and placed in separate cells. Neither prisoner is allowed to talk to the other, and the…
March 6, 2006
We usually try to stay focused on cognitive psychology here at Cognitive Daily, but today I did want to point you to a book review I've written in The Quarterly Conversation. I think Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers may just be the kind of book that can change the way the world thinks about global…
March 3, 2006
Every year, millions of people around the world make a game out of predicting the winners of the Academy Awards. Sometimes, there's even an office pool, with hundreds of dollars going to the winner.
Of course, many fewer of us have actually seen all the nominated films. Do you ever wonder if seeing…
March 2, 2006
When human infants are born, the physical structure of their brains has not fully developed: the human brain continues to grow for more than two years after birth. It's very clear that newborn infants don't have the same cognitive abilities as babies even 6 months older. For example, they can't…
February 24, 2006
This week's survey was inspired by our efforts to get our middle-school-aged kids to behave appropriately when greeting adults. Both Jim and Nora tend to mumble, look away, hunch over, and give other anti-social cues when, say, an adult compliments them after a school band concert or a play. When…
February 23, 2006
Since yesterday's post on attention grabbed so much, well, attention, let's try another one. Only this time, instead of looking at what factors cause us to pay attention to something, we'll consider an experiment that studied the emotional effects of attention. If you're asked to look for people…
February 22, 2006
I'm sure most Cognitive Daily readers are aware of the massive debate permeating the scientific world these days. No, not evolution versus creationism; I'm talking about object- versus space-based attention.
Haven't heard of this raging debate? Well, then, let me refer you to a fascinating pair of…
February 20, 2006
Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now, at age 12). However, as our knowledge of how infants begin to perceive the world around them has increased, we've…
February 17, 2006
This week's Casual Fridays survey studies the cues you use to decide if a new acquaintance is friendly or confident. Greta and I have a couple of ideas about how the responses might break down in America, but we're especially interested in how customs differ in different parts of the world.
Click…
February 17, 2006
Last week's Casual Friday study was all about illusion. For example, you may have thought our goal was to see how well you could recognize an illusion. However, we really just wanted to know what kind of computers our readers use:
Amazingly, Cognitive Daily readers use Macs at a rate (22.8…
February 16, 2006
Can you tell the difference between the images below?
At first, they just look like fuzzy diagonal lines -- there doesn't appear to be a significant difference between them. But if you look at them closely, you begin to notice that the images at the top of the picture (category A) tend to have…
February 15, 2006
An old college friend and accomplished writer, John Scalzi, recently posted a list of writing tips for nonprofessionals, which I'd highly recommend for professionals and nonprofessionals alike. One of his most unusual suggestions is to "speak what you write" -- literally, to read your writing out…
February 13, 2006
The TV movie Flight 93, which re-enacted the hijacking of a United Airlines flight on September 11, 2001, was criticized because it "humanized" the hijackers (despite this apparent humanity of their captors, the movie did portray the passengers and crew on that flight fighting back and eventually…
February 10, 2006
This week's Casual Friday study is the most complicated design we've done yet. However, in the spirit of Casual Fridays, it should still take only a minute or two of your time. It involves an incredibly clever visual illusion, and should be quite fun as well.
As usual, you have until 11:59 Eastern…
February 10, 2006
Last week's survey asked readers how their drinking habits changed when they were at work-related social events compared to with friends. Due to my own very casual Friday, I posted the survey rather late, after 10:00 p.m., so we received fewer responses than usual: just 137. Nonetheless, even with…