Perception

Here's this week's list of notable posts from Psychology and Neuroscience at ResearchBlogging.org. Is autism really surging? Michelle Dawson wonders whether the recent rise in autism rates can be traced to methodological differences in studies tracking autism rates. We know many men are attracted to younger women, but what does it mean to look younger? Wayne Hooke looks at a recent study and concludes that looking younger may be a matter of looking less masculine. Ever had a song that you just can't get out of your head -- an "earworm"? You'd think that psychologists would be all over…
Television can have a huge influence on our lives. But the most important influences may be the ones we don't even notice. I discuss several fascinating studies about television in my latest column on Seedmagazine.com. Here's a snippet: Travis Saunders, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa who studies the impact of sedentary lifestyles, questions whether a little exercise can make up for hours of inactivity. He refers to a study led by G.F. Dunton of the University of Southern California and published in October in the International Journal of Obesity. The researchers conducted a phone…
[Originally published in January, 2006] Clicking on the image below will take you to a short Quicktime movie. Make sure you have your sound turned up, because I've recorded a few sentences that play along with the movie. Your job is to determine, as quickly as possible, if each sentence is grammatically correct -- while you focus your vision on the animated display. This demonstration replicates part of an experiment conducted by a group of researchers led by Michael P. Kaschak. The researchers showed similar animations to a group of volunteers and asked them to make similar judgments…
I attended an unusual middle school. It was designed on an "open concept," with the idea that there should be no walls between classrooms. Social pressure would keep the noise levels down, because if kids got too loud, then their peers in other classes would encourage them to hush up. This actually worked most of the time, but one day one of the English teacher's classes was getting out of hand, and after trying several ways to get their attention, she resorted to something a big more dramatic. In a very loud voice, she simply said SEX! Her class, and several classes nearby, instantly stared…
What part of the body do you listen with? The ear is the obvious answer, but it's only part of the story - your skin is also involved. When we listen to someone else speaking, our brain combines the sounds that our ears pick up with the sight of the speaker's lips and face, and subtle changes in air movements over our skin. Only by melding our senses of hearing, vision and touch do we get a full impression of what we're listening to.  When we speak, many of the sounds we make (such as the English "p" or "t") involve small puffs of air. These are known as "aspirations". We can't hear them,…
A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness. Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly…
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's not that the administration didn't try to encourage its students to socialize. The library did close at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. There was not one but two film societies, so often students had to choose…
The human brain has an uncanny ability to see the human form in the most unlikely places. Religious icons in toast and faces in the clouds are but a few examples. Here it is droplets of water colliding with each other. I call the shot above "Man and Woman." This tendency to create order out of chaos never stops to amaze me. I will leave it to the reader to see what they can find in the image below. These images were taken with a Cognisys Inc. water drip valve and microprocessor camera controller. The flash is from two off axis strobes with a duration of 1/60,000th of a second. More…
Recently we took our hybrid car into the shop for its annual emissions test. In our state, the test is conducted while the car is idling. A hybrid doesn't actually idle -- it shuts the engine off completely. So our car's emissions were tested at 0 RPM. It may be time to rethink our state's emissions laws. There's another law that might need rethinking in the age of hybrids. Our car's internal combustion engine often doesn't start up even when the car is moving at low speeds -- it uses electric motors, running nearly silently. This can potentially be dangerous for pedestrians in parking lots…
From a young age, children learn about the sounds that animals make. But even without teaching aides like Old Macdonald's farm, it turns out that very young babies have an intuitive understanding of the noises that humans, and even monkeys, ought to make. Athena Vouloumanos from New York University found that at just five months of age, infants match human speech to human faces and monkey calls to monkey faces. Amazingly, this wasn't a question of experience - the same infants failed to match quacks to duck faces, even though they had more experience with ducks than monkeys. Voloumanos…
In the movie industry, special effects and computer-generated imagery are becoming better and more realistic. As they'd improve, you'd expect moviegoers to more readily accept virtual worlds and characters, but that's not always the case. It turns out that people are incredibly put off by images or animations of humans that strive for realism, but aren't quite there yet. A character like Wall-E is lovable because he's clearly not human but has many human-like qualities and expressions. In contrast, the more realistic CG-characters of Beowulf or The Polar Express are far closer to reality but…
ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for example, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly. Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that these are more than just anecdotes, and that performance in sports can actually affect perception. A…
The other day, our car wouldn't start and Jim had to ask a neighbor over to help him jump-start it. There was much rushing in and out of the house looking for flashlights and other tools to help get the job done. After the neighbor left, Jim wanted to drive somewhere and couldn't find the keys. Clearly he had just had them because he was working on the car. Where could they be? We searched up and down throughout the house, but we couldn't find them and eventually had to use a spare set. The next morning as I was getting ready to leave for our school carpool in our other car, I found them…
How did you decide to read this post? You might have seen the headline in an RSS reader or noticed it on the ScienceBlogs home page. Maybe someone emailed or tweeted the link to you. But you still had to make the decision to actually read it. How do you know when you made that decision? In 1965 H.H. Kornhuber and L. Deeke found that brain activity precedes a conscious choice (voluntarily pressing a button) by 500 to 1,000 milliseconds. But in 1983 a team led by B. Libet found that when people were asked when they consciously decided to press a button, they said their decision came about 200…
Take a look at the following picture: Your job is to look for the one line that's either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. It took me about 25 seconds to find it. Can you do better? How about now? A little easier, right? But the task can be made difficult again by randomly changing the colors of all the other lines in the picture, a few at a time. Now you don't know which flash to look at and the task is just as hard as it was before. But a team led by Erik Van der Burg found an interesting way to make the task easy again: just add a clicking sound that plays only when the…
Take a look at these photos of Jim and Nora: They've clearly been distorted (using the "spherize" filter in Photoshop), but in opposite directions. Jim's been "expanded" to make more spherical, while Nora has been "contracted" to look more concave. If you look at these photos for a while, you might have difficulty recognizing how Jim and Nora look normally. This is an aftereffect. Aftereffects can be experienced in a number of ways, with dizziness being perhaps the most frequently observed -- spin around a few times with your eyes open and the room will appear to be spinning in the opposite…
Itching is an unpleasant sensation that drives us to scratch reflexively in an effort to remove harmful substances from our body. It's also how I get most of my physical activity for the day. Not being able to scratch an itch is intensely frustrating and many scientists have long described itch as the milder cousin of pain. But a team of scientists from Washington University's Pain Center (I wonder if they have problems with recruitment) have discovered a group of neurons in the spines of mice that are specific to itch but not to pain. Remove them, and mice hardly ever scratch when they're…
You may have noticed that Cognitive Daily hasn't exactly been living up to its name recently. During the summer vacation season, we travel quite a bit, so it's difficult to maintain our usual pace of posting. But along the way we've collected some great photos, and we'll try to share a few of them with you when it's relevant. For example, take a look at this picture I took in Maine about a week ago: It's a lovely section of the Maine coast, readily identifiable by anyone as "shoreline." Earlier in the summer we vacationed with our nieces on the North Carolina coast, just a few hours' drive…
This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Fizzy drinks like Perrier and Coca-Cola are targeted at a huge range of social groups, but if fruit flies had any capital to spend, they'd be at the top of the list. Unlike posh diners or hyperactive kids, flies have taste sensors that are specially tuned to the flavour of carbonated water. Humans can pick up five basic tastes - sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (savoury). But other animals, with very different diets, can probably expand on this set. And what better place to start looking for these…
Take a look at this quick movie. What you'll see is two sets of three views of the same scene (our living room). For each group of three views, your job is to decide if the third view is taken from the same angle as one of the two previous views. After the first two views flash by, the text "Same?" will appear, and that's your cue to decide if the third view is the same as EITHER of the first two. Give it a shot: Do you think you got the correct answer? Was either of the two sequences more difficult than the other? The movie was inspired by a recent experiment led by Monica Castelhano.…