Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
May 3, 2005
When we were first married, Greta and I lived in New York City for five years. One of the biggest challenges of living in New York was navigating around the subway stations, complex warrens of underground tunnels that can extend for hundreds of yards. I was certain I had the best method for…
April 30, 2005
We often think of music as expressing emotions, and research has backed this notion up. But typically the research has focused on melodic instruments: sweet, sorrowful violins; bright, happy guitars; melancholy, wailing oboes. So what about percussion instruments: drums, cymbals, tympani—can they…
April 28, 2005
I used to be a high school biology teacher, and I noticed that students often found it easier to learn irrelevant information than the information I was trying to teach. When learning the steps involved in the process of cell division, the students simply memorized the pictures in their textbook.…
April 26, 2005
Humans readily establish false memories. If you give adults a study list of words like hot, snow, warm, winter, ice, wet, chilly, weather, heat, freeze, shiver, frost, and then test them later, they will "remember" related words like cold that weren't actually on the list. They will be as sure that…
April 25, 2005
It's impossible to pay attention to everything in the visual field at once. If we could, magicians would be out of business: most "magic" tricks work by distracting the viewers' attention while the real trick is being done in plain sight.
However, if a new object enters our field of view, we…
April 22, 2005
How is language acquired? We don't have to teach our children to speak; instead they just seem to pick it up on their own. Because language is acquired so readily, the study of language acquisition can be a messy business. What portion of language ability is "hard wired" into the brain, and what…
April 20, 2005
There has been a great deal of reporting about the harmful impact of video games, including here at Cognitive Daily. Yet the simple act of playing a video game can require learning a great deal of information. We have discussed studies showing impressive perceptual gains after just a short time…
April 18, 2005
September 11. The Challenger disaster. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. If we were over the age of 10 when these events occurred, we all remember them vividly: where we were when we heard the news, the weather that day, how we felt. It's as if these memories were imprinted on our minds…
April 13, 2005
Yesterday we reported on the results of studies on the impact of media violence. Today we'll discuss theoretical implications and responses to those studies, as reported by Craig Anderson et al. in their report "The Influence of Media Violence on Youth."
Given the fact that there is a significant…
April 12, 2005
Yesterday we reported on the general reactions to studies on the impact of media violence. Today we'll get into the specifics of those studies, as reported by Craig Anderson et al. in their report "The Influence of Media Violence on Youth."
The history of research on media violence and its…
April 11, 2005
In the summer of 2000, a committee of scholars was commissioned to write a chapter on the effects of media violence on youth for the Surgeon General's Report on Youth Violence, published in January 2001. But their chapter was not included in the Surgeon General's final report. The reason for the…
April 9, 2005
(source of original images: Wikipedia. See license)
When my daughter Nora was 15 months old, she had started to pick up a few words. She could say "Mommy," and "Daddy," and "JimmyNO," which is what she called her brother. However, she had only two words for animals: all animals were called either…
April 6, 2005
Listen to these two musical excerpts and note any differences you discern:
Ave Maria, version 1Ave Maria, version 2
(Source: courtesy of Mayumi Hamamoto and Kyota Ko)
If you're a typical nonmusician, you will probably notice some sort of difference between the two excerpts. Maybe one seems to be…
April 5, 2005
It is well known that humans and other animals can recognize biological motion when shown only a point-light display. Other research has shown that social cues are deeply embedded in our perceptual system. We can also perceive emotions and intentions in simple geometric displays.
So what is going…
April 4, 2005
Wine expert Robert Parker claims to be able to distinguish every wine he has ever tasted—10,000 different wines a year—by taste alone. Winemakers can use their sense of smell to detect slight imbalances early in the wine production process that might lead to a spoiled batch. Meanwhile, novices walk…
April 2, 2005
One of the most difficult things for small children to learn is how to take someone else's perspective. If a typical three year old hides a toy when her brother is out of the room, she believes he will know where it is when he returns. By the time they are five, most children will not make this…
March 31, 2005
Early childhood education can often seem like one of the most over-researched fields imaginable. So many parents are so concerned with the fate of their progeny, that it's natural for research to focus on more effective ways to teach kids. Yet the process of learning is also so complex that it can…
March 30, 2005
Psychologists and neuroscientists can be said to be working on the same problem, but they tend to approach it from opposite directions. Psychologists generally look at behavior and then try to understand the mental processes that might cause that behavior. Neuroscientists look at brain activity and…
March 28, 2005
The NCAA basketball tournament is down to the wire now, with only four teams left. How will the players respond? Will they be able to perform under the incredible pressure from the other teams, the coaches, and most of all, the fans filling in their tournament pool brackets?
Today's headline might…
March 24, 2005
When we look at a scene, it often seems as if we perceive it all at once. Yet in fact, we are physically able to accurately view only a tiny portion of the scene at a time. Take a look at this image of a human retina (the back of your eyeball). The portion of the eye responsible for accurate vision…
March 23, 2005
When you look at a picture, you are probably generally focused on the central objects, though the overall style might catch your eye. But what about your memory for the background of the picture? Put another way, how accurate are you at recalling the exact borders of a particular view? For that…
March 18, 2005
Language researchers have long relied on participants suffering from language disorders as a means to better understand how language develops in healthy people. A new special issue of Applied Psycholinguistics covers the study of mental disorders that affect language development. Cognitive Daily…
March 16, 2005
I've taken only two pictures of the Mona Lisa, and both turned out about the same: they captured the frenzied attempts of dozens of tourists trying to take a picture of the most-recognized image in the world. Here's the one I took last summer:
I hadn't noticed it until now, but the motion of the…
March 15, 2005
A few weeks ago, an article appeared in my local newspaper. According to the article, many mothers were beginning to teach their kids sign language, starting at a very young age. Both kids and parents had perfect hearing, but the babies learned sign language even before they could speak,…
March 14, 2005
With every new generation of violent video game, there seems to be a new outcry about the damage it may be doing to young minds. Yet there has been comparatively little research detailing exactly how video game violence actually corresponds to behavior in the real world. While Grand Theft Auto…
March 10, 2005
About two weeks ago I engaged in a seemingly pointless exercise in male bonding: I played 24 hours of video games with my son. It turns out, even aside from perfecting my guacamole recipe, the experience may have done me some good.
C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester…
March 9, 2005
Dear 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…
March 8, 2005
Have 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…
March 4, 2005
The 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…
March 2, 2005
Take 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…