dmunger | March 20, 2006College 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 was the biggest mistake of my life," he responded in anguish. Eventually, the officers told him that witnesses had seen him near where the body was buried and that his fingerprints had been found on the murder weapon. These statements astonished Page, who hadn't even remembered leaving his apartment.…
dmunger | March 17, 2006Our 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 she had ever seen him wearing glasses. Apparently, he takes the glasses off as soon as he gets to the bus stop.
Since neither Greta nor I spend even a waking moment without our glasses, we were curious how much of the time other people wore glasses. Hence today's study. You will first be directed to…
dmunger | March 17, 2006Last 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).
What was all the fuss about? First of all, the experience of taking the survey seemed awfully random: first, you were asked your birthday. Then you were asked to think of something sad, happy, or anger-inspiring. Or you were asked about the last time you had something to eat. Finally you were…
dmunger | March 16, 2006A 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, when presented with nonvisual stimuli such as tastes or smells, perceive visual imagery. I'm talking about the scientifically recognized condition, synesthesia. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode.…
dmunger | March 14, 2006If 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 confirmed this notion, finding that young adults express stronger preference ratings for music than older adults.
Take a look at a random sampling of accounts on MySpace, and you'll see that nearly every member has a song associated with his or her account. It's as if music somehow forms part of a person's…
dmunger | March 13, 2006In 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 Cognitive Daily is take a closer look at psychology articles in the mainstream media, to see if the media reporting on research matches up with the actual data. But we've been frustrated recently on several occasions because the actual data hadn't been published yet.
The answer isn't as simple as you think…
dmunger | March 10, 2006This 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 purpose.
Click here to participate.
As usual, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday, March 15 or until we have 250 responses to participate. Look for the results next Casual Friday.
For now, I'm going to close comments on this post, but feel free to e-mail me with any questions.…
dmunger | March 10, 2006Does 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 you take Colbert's case as an example, it appears that no expertise is necessary to predict the Oscar winners. Of course, since Colbert's TV character is a parody of conservative political commentators, we can never be quite sure if he's being on the level about his level of movie expertise.
At…
dmunger | March 9, 2006We'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 conversation itself is.
Research on aging has suggested that older drivers may be even more impaired by driving with a cell phone than younger drivers, since older adults tend to perform worse on "dual task" activities than younger adults. But what about the years of driving experience that older adults have…
dmunger | March 7, 2006The 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 interrogators don't have enough evidence to prosecute either one. If prisoner A confesses and prisoner B doesn't, then prisoner A is released and prisoner B gets punished. If both confess, then both will get a lighter sentence. If neither confesses, then both will be released. For each prisoner,…
dmunger | March 6, 2006We 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 warming. Here's some of why I found it so compelling:
Perhaps most convincing is The Weather Makers' presentation of the vast amount of knowledge about historical climate change that has been accumulated. The information puts our era into context, and provides a compelling rebuttal for those who…
dmunger | March 3, 2006Every 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 the films gives Oscar-predictors an advantage? Now's your chance to find out. This week, we're collecting Oscar predictions, and also asking predictors to indicate how many of the movies they've seen. Next week, we'll let you know if seeing the movies actually helps people more accurately predict…
gmunger | March 3, 2006Last week we asked our readers to identify the agents and actions in some point light displays. These displays show the motion of the joints of the actor (say, a human walker) and we are remarkably good at identifying various actors, actions, and even emotions.
Our three movies showed some kind of quadripedal action, and we provided a long list of possible anwers. Two of our three movies depicted very typical actions for the actor--a dog walking, and a human baby crawling. The third movie showed something slightly unusual--a human adult crawling. Did the unusualness of the action matter…
dmunger | March 2, 2006When 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 move their heads follow along a movement with their eyes. They appear to have very little control over their limbs. Three-month-olds have difficulty reaching and grasping objects. For humans, walking or crawling isn't a remote possibility for more than six months. Contrast this to wildebeasts, for…
gmunger | March 1, 2006We've reported on a variety of different studies looking video games and various measures of aggression (you can check out our "Video Games / Technology" category, and our archives) and a fairly common reaction, often coming from an avid gamer, is that this simply isn't true about him. Now one of the serious complications of doing psychological research is that our intuitions about how, or even what, we are doing can be dramatically wrong--this is why psychologists started doing experiments some one hundred and twenty odd years ago. You cannot refute a careful experiment with a personal…
gmunger | February 27, 2006You can get a lot of information from a simple bar graph, but to what extent does the arrangement of the bars matter? You can find great commentary about good design, but what about a nice clean experiment? Martin H. Fischer led a team that asked participants to indicate if a given relationship was true or false, based on a variety of different bar graphs. For example, is A > B in this graph?
And what about this one?
If you are like most people, it was easier to confirm that A was larger than B in the first graph -- where the bars were oriented vertically. In addition to…
dmunger | February 24, 2006This 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 we tell them to stand up straight and speak clearly, they often give us a look that suggests we are not only clueless to the social norms of respectable society, but also just plain stupid.
Now we have hard (though nonscientific) data to back up our claims: we asked Cognitive Daily readers what…
gmunger | February 24, 2006Dave hasn't finished analyzing the data from last week's survey, but since this week's survey is ready to go, we thought we'd go ahead and post it now.
Click here to participate.
As always, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday, March 1 to complete the survey, which should only take a minute of your time. But don't wait too long, because the survey will close when we receive 250 responses.
Dave should have last week's results up within a few hours.
dmunger | February 23, 2006Since 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 with blond hair, for example, you may eventually come to have a different emotional response to people with blond hair than others.
A team led by Mark Fenske developed a simple procedure to see if the focus of our attention can affect emotion. Twenty-four college students participated in a task that…
dmunger | February 22, 2006I'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 experiments conducted by Massimo Turatto, Veronica Mazza, and Carlo Umiltà. The issue comes down to this: a critical problem for psychologists is the issue of attention. How does the perceptual system decide where to focus our attention when literally millions of bits of information are available to…