dmunger | April 29, 2009When you selected the college or university you planned to attend, how did you do it? Did you read narratives offered by college guides? Did you compare relevant statistics such as the student/teacher ratio and percent of students who went on to graduate school? Did you listen to the advice of older friends who had attended the school? Or did you visit the school in person? And which of these factors had the most impact on your decision?
For many students, the campus visit is the deal-maker (or breaker). Here at Davidson I've met many students who said they had been undecided, but when they…
dmunger | April 27, 2009Last year's movie Changeling tells the story, from the late 1920s, of a mother whose son is kidnapped. Then, six months later, the police say they've found the boy and return him to his mother, who immediately claims that the boy they returned was not her son. She's then coerced into taking this child in, and doctors are brought forward to convince her that this is really her son. People change, she is told, and she's has been through severe mental trauma. Surely the best medical minds in the country know better than a single mother.
The film ends up being a scathing indictment of the LAPD,…
dmunger | April 24, 2009On Tuesday I got to see Greta and Nora performing with the Davidson College Symphony Orchestra. As usual, they did a fantastic job playing and the orchestra received a standing ovation. One of the pieces they played was BedÅich Smetana's tone poem "The Moldau," which, as the conductor explained, took us on a journey across what is now the Czech Republic. We heard two streams converging into a river, a peasant dance, the city of Prague, and finally the end of the river as it empties into a large one. Or did we just think that's what we heard because that's what the conductor told us to hear?
A…
dmunger | April 23, 2009Imagine the following scenario:
Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten's body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?
Or how about this one:
You find a wallet with several hundred dollars in cash, along with credit cards including an American Express Gold Card and ID locating the owner's home in the richest neighborhood in town…
dmunger | April 22, 2009I was a member of my high school debate team, and I did fairly well, but my partner, Glenn, always got better marks from the judges. Most often, they praised his hand gestures, which were proclaimed to be "expressive" and "informative." One year our topic was arms control, and our opponents were arguing that "NATO standardization" could help reduce U.S. arms sales. Glenn didn't understand their argument, so during our precious three minutes of preparation time, I explained it to him. Then he stood up and delivered his rebuttal, using the most graceful hand gestures imaginable. The judges…
dmunger | April 20, 2009How many of these faces can you recognize?
Even though these are extremely famous individuals, it's unlikely that you'll be able to identify all four of them, because the pictures were taken early in life, before they became famous. But give it your best shot and try to name them in the comments. I'll reveal the correct answers later today.
We know that there are some individuals who have great difficulty identifying even current photos of very famous people, and often can't identify the faces of close friends or family members. This condition, called prosopagnosia, was once thought to be…
dmunger | April 17, 2009Last week I created a survey that was truly humbling. The goal was to find out if time and money invested in preparing for the SAT and other standardized college admission tests is worth it. The first thing I learned from the study was that Cognitive Daily readers are incredibly smart -- much smarter than me, for example. Take a look at this graph of high-school class ranking among survey respondents:
As you can see, nearly half of survey respondents were in the top 4 percent of their high school class, and over 70 percent were in the top 10 percent. Only 15 percent of respondents ranked…
dmunger | April 16, 2009Several studies have confirmed this bizarre proposition: If you're taking a test of rote memorization, like words from a list, move your eyes from side to side for about 30 seconds before you start. Really.
Researchers have found, with relative consistency, that if you saccade from left to right and back several times before a test of simple recall, you're likely to do better. Why? It may be that this quick activity helps facilitate interaction between the brain hemispheres. Since split-brain patients have more difficulty recalling words than people with normal brains, any activity that…
dmunger | April 13, 2009One of the most controversial topics here on Cognitive Daily is whether playing video games can lead to aggressive behavior or violence -- and one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the impact of violent video games was a 2000 study by Craig Anderson and Karen Dill. In that study, participants played violent or non-violent games, and then were asked to play another "game," this time against what they believed was a real person in a nearby room. In fact, there was no human opponent, and the game was rigged so that the player "won" half the time. The gamers were wearing headphones, and…
dmunger | April 10, 2009It's test-taking season for high-school juniors in the U.S. Most students take the SAT test, which claims to assess mathematical, verbal, and writing ability to help the college/university admissions process. The pressure to succeed on this and other tests has led to the creation of a whole cottage industry, selling books, software, classes, and even summer camps devoted to getting better scores on the tests. Some parents spend thousands of dollars preparing their children to take the test, in addition to the hundreds they might spend to take and retake the test, searching for the elusive…
dmunger | April 8, 2009The Mafa people, who live in the far north of Cameroon in the Mandara mountains, are one of the most culturally isolated groups in the world. Since many of their settlements lack electricity, there are some individuals who have never been exposed to western movies, art, or music.
But the Mafa do have their own musical tradition. Many of their ceremonies are accompanied by a unique chorus of flutes of varying sizes, which can produce different pitches by covering and uncovering a small hole at their tip. The music they produce is quite different from Western-style music. Here's a sample:…
dmunger | April 6, 2009[Originally posted in November, 2007]
Do people ever tell you to "just smile, you'll feel better"? If you're like our daughter Nora, you hear it a lot, and you get annoyed every time you hear it. Telling a teenager to smile is probably one of the best ways to ensure she won't smile for the next several hours. But the notion that "smiling will make you feel better" has actually been confirmed by research. There are several studies demonstrating that people are happier when they smile, at least in certain circumstances.
It's not as easy as you might think to study the effect. For one thing, it'…
dmunger | April 3, 2009Last week we asked our readers about their reasoning behind decisions they and others make about personal security. Are some of us just paranoid? Or do the decisions we make about security and safety reflect the real threats around us?
Actually, since this is just a casual study, we're not going to measure real threats -- we'll have to use a proxy: people's own perceptions of the threats facing them in their community. How safe do our readers feel their communities are? Here's how they rated the crime rates where they live:
Nearly 80 percent of respondents said crime rates were average or…
dmunger | April 1, 2009Take a look at this astonishing (and adorable) video demonstrating how a baby acquires object permanence.
At 6 months old, the baby can see and reach for an object, but as soon as it is hidden, she doesn't seem to realize it's there. The baby is interested and excited by the objects, but when they're not visible, it's as if her memory has been wiped clean.
By 10 months, the phenomenon has vanished and the baby behaves like any older child would, clearly realizing that the book is hidden under the blanket and immediately uncovering it.
But 10-month-olds will make another error. If you have…
dmunger | March 31, 2009Take another look at this picture of the Rokeby Venus from last week's post on mirrors in art:
Now, imagine you're actually in the room with Venus, as depicted in this painting. You suspend your astonishment long enough to conduct a quick test of the principle of how a flat mirror works. Consider what would happen to Venus' face in the mirror as you approach it. As you walk towards the mirror, would the proportion of the reflection taken up by Venus's face increase or decrease? In the painting, the face takes about 2/3 the width of the mirror. Would that proportion get bigger or smaller as…
dmunger | March 27, 2009Most of us believe that the things we do to stay safe make a lot of sense. But some other people clearly are being unreasonably careful. One might even call them "paranoid." But is there a general consensus about how to stay safe in the modern world? Or does it depend -- on your age, where you live, or just your own personality quirks? Maybe this little survey will help us find out.
Click here to participate
As usual, the survey is brief, with 20 or so questions. It should take just a few minutes to respond. You have until Thursday, April 2 to complete your response. There is no limit on the…
dmunger | March 27, 2009Here's a bonus bit of analysis from last week's Casual Fridays study. In addition to asking respondents how familiar they were with our selection of stories, we also asked them to describe some detail of the story that was independently verifiable, like how the story ended.
The reason we did this was to double-check the self-reported responses. If everyone had said they were familiar with the Fox and the Grapes fable, but then half of the respondents got the ending wrong, we would have had a reason to discount the self-reported responses. As it turned out, for most of the stories, people who…
dmunger | March 26, 2009The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez is a good example of a very common illusion in many paintings:
Most viewers would say this picture depicts a woman viewing her own reflection in a mirror. But based on the orientation of the mirror, it's actually physically impossible for her to see her own reflection. Since we can see her face, then if she could see face in the mirror, her head would have to be positioned between us and the the mirror. At best all she would be able to see is us (or rather, the painter painting her picture).
Art critics have suggested that there's another problem with…
dmunger | March 23, 2009Last week I mentioned that Greta had been discussing a study with her class that was related to the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. When most of her students hadn't heard the story, it provided the opportunity for a lengthy aside: our Casual Fridays study about which stories people had and hadn't heard.
Greta didn't bring up the story in class to embarrass her students about their apparent lack of knowledge of children's stories; she mentioned it because it's probably the easiest way to understand an important psychological phenomenon called "behavior-induced attitude change."
The fable…
dmunger | March 20, 2009Last week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by an event in Greta's classroom. She had assumed that most of her students would be familiar with the story of the Fox and the Grapes, which goes as follows:
ONE hot summer's day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again…