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A new cognitive psychology article nearly every day

Dave Munger
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January 14, 2010
12:05 PM
413 views

Synesthesia and the McGurk effect

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

We've discussed synesthesia many times before on Cognitive Daily -- it's the seemingly bizarre phenomenon when one stimulus (e.g. a sight or a sound) is experienced in multiple modalities (e.g. taste, vision, or colors). For example, a person might experience a particular smell whenever a given word or letter is seen or heard. Sometimes particular faces are associated with specific colors or auras. Synesthesia is relatively rare, but the people who experience it are genuine: their perceptions are consistent and replicable.

But one question researchers haven't been able to nail down is exactly how synesthesia occurs. Consider the relatively common form of synesthesia, where colors are perceived along with words. One synesthete consistently sees the color green when she hears someone say "neat." Does the synesthetic experience occur when she first detects the word, or only after she understands its meaning?

A team led by Gary Bargary has figured out a new way to test when a synesthetic experience occurs by relying on the McGurk Effect. In the McGurk effect, the word you "hear" someone saying changes depending on what you see. This movie gives a quick demonstration of the phenomenon:

In the first clip, I superimposed the sound of myself saying "neat neat peat peat" over video of myself saying "neat peat neat peat". What most people think they hear is "neat meat peat peat." You can see the actual recording of what I said in the second part of the clip. Because my mouth makes a similar movement when I say "p" and "m", the combination of the audio "neat" with a video "peat" makes viewers think they heard "meat." Listeners use both the audio and video information to decide what I'm saying, and they get it wrong! Did you experience the illusion? Let's make this a poll: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Bargary G, Barnett KJ, Mitchell KJ, & Newell FN. (2009) Colored-speech synaesthesia is triggered by multisensory, not unisensory, perception. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20(5), 529-33. PMID: 19476587

January 12, 2010
04:58 PM
389 views

Does watching TV really kill you?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Today I had to put off my normal morning run in order to make time to be interviewed on a radio show at 7:30 a.m. As I waited on hold for the interview to start, I could hear the hosts joking back-and-forth about what the "latest TV controversy" is. "Is it the Jay Leno / Conan O'Brien news on NBC?" the host asked? No. Then the hosts rattled through several other hot-button issues on television before arriving at this: "New research from the American Heart Association Journal [Circulation] suggests that watching TV might actually reduce how long you live." How's that for a controversy?

The host, John Hockenberry of The Takeaway, then introduced the lead author of the study in question, David Dunstan, and me, and asked us to explain how watching TV may or may not result in death. Dunstan's team's study, as you might expect, has gotten a lot of media attention. There was a press release, a report on CNN, and many others. It was nearly midnight in Dunstan's home in Australia, and he had been taking interviews all day.

I had been selected as a commentator because of my column a few weeks ago on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM where I discuss the harms and benefits of TV. So, presumably, my "pro-TV" viewpoint would balance Dunstan's "anti-TV" research.

But for the most part, science doesn't lend itself to this sort of position-taking. We can understand the results of a study, and perhaps do a bit of speculating on the implications, but beyond that there really isn't much room for taking sides. So let's take a closer look at the study in question.

Dunstan's team analyzed data from the massive AusDiab study of diabetes and related diseases in Australia. In 1999 and 2000, researchers visited over 28,000 randomly-selected Australian households to gather medical and other data, to be revisited over many years following. For this study, the researchers identified 8,800 adults who met their criteria for participation (basically, they showed no signs of cardiovascular disease, they completed the entire response form and medical tests, and their results fell in a normal range). Then they observed who died over the next six to seven years, a total of 284 individuals. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Dunstan, D., Barr, E., Healy, G., Salmon, J., Shaw, J., Balkau, B., Magliano, D., Cameron, A., Zimmet, P., & Owen, N. (2010) Television Viewing Time and Mortality. The Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab). Circulation. DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.894824

January 7, 2010
03:22 PM
428 views

The outfielder problem: The psychology behind catching fly balls

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

It's football season in America: The NFL playoffs are about to start, and tonight, the elected / computer-ranked top college team will be determined. What better time than now to think about ... baseball! Baseball players, unlike most football players, must solve one of the most complicated perceptual puzzles in sports: how to predict the path of a moving target obeying the laws of physics, and move to intercept it.

The question of how a baseball player knows where to run in order to catch a fly ball has baffled psychologists for decades. (You might argue that a football receiver faces a similar task, but generally in football, the distances involved are much shorter, and most football players aren't expected to catch passes at all.)

There are three primary possible explanations for how a baseball fielder catches a fly ball:

Trajectory Projection (TP): The fielder calculates the trajectory of a ball the moment it is hit and simply runs to the spot where it will fall (of course, taking into account wind speed and barometric pressure).
Optical acceleration cancellation (OAC): The fielder watches the flight of the ball; constantly adjusting her position in response to what she sees. If it appears to be accelerating upward, she moves back. If it seems to be accelerating downward, she moves forward.
Linear optical trajectory (LOT): The fielder pays attention to the apparent angle formed by the ball, the point on the ground beneath the ball, and home plate, moving to keep this angle constant until she reaches the ball. In other words, she tries to move so that the ball appears to be moving in a straight line rather than a parabola.

In principle, all three of these systems should work. However, TP is probably impossible; our visual system isn't accurate at determining distances beyond about 30 meters, and outfielders stand up to 100 meters away from home plate. The second system, OAC, might not work because the visual system isn't actually very sensitive to acceleration. And the third system, LOT, is problematic because it doesn't predict a unique path for the fielder to take to the ball. Further, the most likely paths a fielder would take to catch a ball wouldn't be much different under OAC and LOT.

But Philip Fink, Patrick Foo, and William Warren figured out a way to experimentally distinguish between all three models. They had 8 skilled male baseball players and 4 skilled female softball players don VR headsets and attempt to catch virtual balls in a large room. The room was big enough that they could freely move 6 meters in each direction. VR was necessary because the researchers made their virtual balls take paths that aren't possible in real life: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Fink, P.W., Foo, P.S., & Warren, W.H. (2009) Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem. Journal of Vision, 9(13), 1-8. info:/10.1167/9.13.14

January 4, 2010
04:15 PM
445 views

Is there an easier way to detect lies than what you see on TV?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

The TV show Lie To Me focuses on the exploits of an expert in lie-detection as he solves perplexing crimes in his high-tech Washington laboratory. It's actually fun to watch, especially since it appears to make some effort to get the science right (a real-life expert on lie-detection, Paul Ekman, serves as a science adviser on the show).

One of the show's premises is that only highly-trained experts (most importantly, its protagonist, Cal Lightman) are capable of sniffing out a well-schooled liar. This too is based in fact. Most of us are very bad at spotting liars, taking their seemingly earnest facial expressions as the real thing. Ekman's research, along with many others, has shown that it's possible to detect subtle differences between authentic emotional expressions and the real thing. Since telling a lie invokes its own distinctive emotions, it's possible to see remnants of these emotions by carefully watching a liar in the act of deceit, even when the liar masks his or her true feelings with a feigned emotion.

But what if there was a shortcut in sniffing out a lie, relying on our own instinctual behavior? Would it be possible to improve the lie-detecting abilities of ordinary people without all that training? A team led by Mariëlle Stel had a hunch that our tendency to mimic the physical and facial expressions of the people we are speaking to might help us to tell when they are lying.

They recruited 92 volunteers to participate in a very short conversation. The volunteers were paired up randomly, and one person from each pair was randomly assigned to be the truth-teller or liar. This person was asked before meeting the other participant if he or she would like to make a donation to Amnesty International, and then, randomly, told to either tell the truth or lie about it, with a one-euro reward if they could convince the partner they were telling the truth. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Stel M, van Dijk E, & Olivier E. (2009) You want to know the truth? Then don't mimic!. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20(6), 693-9. PMID: 19422628

December 17, 2009
04:48 PM
433 views

How many slices does it take to accurately judge personality and intelligence?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Suppose your organization is interviewing candidates for an important job. Would it be better for one trusted person to have an extended interview with them, or for several people to talk to them for less time? How many people would you need to conduct the interviews? Would three be enough? Would ten be too many? If ten is good, wouldn't twenty be even better?

We've discussed thin-slicing studies before -- the idea that a few brief exposures to an individual can give just as accurate an impression of key traits as much more extended interactions. For judging sexual preference in men, a 10-second exposure to pictures of faces isn't any better than a 50-millisecond exposure. For evaluating teaching ability, a few 10-second movie clips are nearly as good as an entire semester in class.

But these studies didn't vary the number of times judges were exposed to the images or video clips. Could seeing more small bits of information about an individual could help people make more accurate judgments? A team led by Peter Borkenau recognized that the vast quantities of data collected in the 1990s for the German Observational Study of Adult Twins (GOSAT) could be used to answer that question. The GOSAT recruited 300 pairs of twins, who underwent detailed personality and intelligence testing, and were also extensively interviewed and videotaped. Borkenau's team wasn't interested in the twins' similarities and differences, so they analyzed the data twice, once for each group of 300 unrelated individuals, then averaged the results together.

Each twin's personality was also rated by two acquaintances, the experimenter who guided their session, and a confederate who had participated in six videotaped sessions with them. The twins were videotaped for a total of fifteen sessions, doing things like introducing themselves, recalling objects they had just seen, telling jokes, and reading newspaper headlines.

Each these 15 video clips were then shown to judges who rated them on 20 personality traits and intelligence, using a five-point scale (e.g. 1 = "unintelligent" and 5 = "intelligent"). Each judge saw only one clip from each individual, and each clip was viewed by four judges. Altogether, 1.26 million ratings were made by the judges. So does the rating of just one clip of an individual correlate to that person's actual personality score from the personality tests? Yes it does, but the strength of the correlation varies depending on what trait is being measured. This graph shows the results:
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Borkenau, P., Mauer, N., Riemann, R., Spinath, F., & Angleitner, A. (2004) Thin Slices of Behavior as Cues of Personality and Intelligence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(4), 599-614. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.86.4.599

December 10, 2009
02:15 PM
467 views

Emotional words distract, but only when you're searching for meaning

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

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 at her in stunned silence. Calmly and quietly, she said "Now that I've got your attention..." and continued on with the lesson.

Clearly words like "sex" are effective at attracting hormonal pre-teenagers' attention, but they also work well for adults. Many studies have confirmed that strongly emotional words can distract attention from a number of tasks. But are emotional words always distracting, and is the distraction unavoidable?

Several studies have found that emotional words don't distract people from tasks that are especially demanding of their attention, but often in these cases the words are displayed at the edge of a computer screen, far removed from the task at hand.

Yang-Ming Huang, Alan Baddeley, and Andrew Young figured out a way to include distracting words at the center of focus during a task. They used a procedure called rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP. We made an example of an RSVP movie when we discussed a study last March. Here are the instructions:

You'll see a random stream of pictures of office equipment, flashing by one every tenth of a second. Embedded in each stream are two pictures: First, a fruit, and then either a face or a watch. You'll be instructed whether to look for a face or a watch, and what to notice about it, before each stream.

Click here to view movie

Typically if you're asked to spot two items in an RSVP presentation, you'll miss the second one if it occurs between about 2/10 and 4/10 of a second after the first one, but not sooner or later. This phenomenon is called Attentional Blink -- a blind spot caused by the temporary distraction of seeing the first item. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Huang, Y., Baddeley, A., & Young, A. (2008) Attentional capture by emotional stimuli is modulated by semantic processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34(2), 328-339. DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.34.2.328

December 8, 2009
02:17 PM
415 views

People identify the sexual orientation of strangers as fast as 50 milliseconds

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Nalini Ambady has become famous for her research on "thin slicing," the idea that ordinary people can make accurate judgments about others amazingly quickly. We've discussed work from her lab showing that people can accurately predict teaching ability by watching just six seconds of video of a teacher at work. Other judgments, like gender, race, and age, can be made even faster.

But what about less obvious traits? Nicholas Rule and Ambady designed a study to see if college students could accurately identify gay men based on photos alone. They selected 90 photos of men from dating websites, carefully choosing only headshots that didn't feature facial hair, jewelry, glasses, or other accessories. Half the photos were of men seeking male partners, and half were seeking female partners. Then the photos were shown in random order to 90 student volunteers. Photos were displayed for either 33 ms, 50 ms, 100 ms, or 6.5 or 10 seconds. In addition, some of the photos were shown with no time limit at all. Immediately after each photo was shown, a mask of scrambled face parts was shown to clear any afterimages. The students were asked to indicate whether the face they had just seen was likely to be gay or straight. Were they accurate? And if so, how quickly could they do it? Here are the results:

The students responded significantly better than chance for every time period except the 33 millisecond exposure. A chance accuracy rate would be 50 percent, and even after just a 50 millisecond exposure, the students were accurate 57 percent of the time. When the results were corrected using signal detection analysis (to compensate for the fact that fewer than 50 percent of men are gay in real life), accuracy was 62 percent at 50 milliseconds, and as high as 70 percent when self-paced.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Rule, N., & Ambady, N. (2008) Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50ms☆. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(4), 1100-1105. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2007.12.001

December 1, 2009
04:51 PM
436 views

What if you saw something that rocked your world ... and you didn't notice?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

If you're a regular reader of Cognitive Daily, you're relatively accustomed to seeing surprising things. Indeed, it's gotten to the point where you might even expect it. You've seen optical illusions and videos that baffle the imagination. Yet most participants in psychology research studies aren't aware of the many ways the mind can be "tricked." One of the most dramatic tricks, which we've discussed several times, is the phenomenon of Change Blindness. An object can change right before your eyes, and you're likely not to notice. When you're made aware of the change, you find it hard to believe that you could have been so dense -- and you're not alone; nearly everyone falls for it.

In several studies, a student or other unwitting recruit is being interviewed by an actor, who is then substituted for a completely different person, and the recruit is usually unsurprised by the change. But even though we don't overtly notice these major changes, perhaps it still affects us in some unconscious way.

Travis Proulx and Steven Heine had 81 student volunteers fill out a questionnaire about their entertainment preferences. For one group of students, partway through the experiment, when the female experimenter went to retrieve a second questionnaire, she secretly switched with another identically-dressed experimenter, who administered the second portion of the test (here's a video of the swap [2.8 MB]). Another group instead answered questions about their own death, designed to increase their sense of mortality. A final group served as a control, with no experimenter swap or mortality questions.

Finally, all three groups read a scenario about the arrest of a prostitute, and were asked to act as a judge and determine the amount of a punitive bond ranging from $0 to $1000. Did swapping experimenters affect their judgment? Here are the results:

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Proulx T, & Heine SJ. (2008) The case of the transmogrifying experimenter: affirmation of a moral schema following implicit change detection. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 19(12), 1294-300. PMID: 19121140

November 24, 2009
04:19 PM
417 views

What your Facebook page says about who you "really" are

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Recently a woman had her sick leave benefits based on a diagnosis of clinical depression terminated because of a few pictures she posted on her Facebook page showing her smiling at a birthday party and enjoying a trip to the beach. Was this a fair assessment of her medical condition? Probably not--people with clinical depression can have moments of genuine joy or elation, and even sad people can fake a smile for a photo.

But regardless of whether a few photos posted online are sufficient evidence for a medical diagnosis, there is a larger question: Does a person's online persona match up to their real-world personality? Since most young people--and a growing number of older adults--maintain some sort of web or online social networking presence, it's important to know whether the digital world is a good representation of the real world.

It's becoming increasingly common to "meet" someone online before you encounter them in real life. In my experience, people I meet online are generally quite recognizable when I finally get together with them at a conference or physical meeting. But maybe I'm just lucky.

Max Weisbuch, Zorana Ivcevic, and Nalini Ambady asked 37 undergraduate volunteers to physically meet with another person and ask each other questions to try to get to know one and other. These brief meetings were videotaped, and, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the person they met with was not a real research participant, but one of six specially trained research assistants who took care to make sure that each volunteer was treated the same.

Immediately after the interview, the researchers obtained permission to download each volunteer's Facebook page. Then their interviewer rated them for likability, and three undergraduate research assistants from a different university rated the videotaped behavior for cues indicating non-verbal expressivity, and for "verbal disclosure"--how willing they were to disclose personal details. A different set of ten undergraduates from a different university rated the volunteers' Facebook pages for likability and expressivity, as well as the number of personal details revealed there.

The researchers found significant correlations between the behavior of the volunteers in person and online. "Liking" in person and online were moderately correlated (r = .33), as were verbal disclosure and online disclosure (r = .34). Non-verbal expressivity was also correlated with online expressivity (r = .41). But the relationship wasn't perfect. While online expressivity was strongly correlated with online liking (r = .61), there was no significant correlation between online expressivity and liking in person.

So a Facebook page really can say a lot about what a person is like in real life--up to a point. The researchers also point out that their study can't tell us much about the student's spontaneous online behavior. A Facebook page might have been carefully crafted over many hours, but other online interactions like tweets and status updates can be much more spur-of-the-moment. It's less clear whether this behavior is related to real-life spontaneity.

Weisbuch, M., Ivcevic, Z., & Ambady, N. (2009). On being liked on the web and in the "real world": Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45 (3), 573-576 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.009 Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Weisbuch, M., Ivcevic, Z., & Ambady, N. (2009) On being liked on the web and in the “real world”: Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 573-576. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.009

November 19, 2009
03:43 PM
483 views

Detecting faces: People use some of the same strategies computers do

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

How does our visual system decide if something is a face? Some automated face-detecting software uses color as one cue that something is a face. For example Apple's iPhoto has no trouble determining that there are two faces in this color picture:

That's Nora in the back, and her cousin Ginger in front. In this picture, however, iPhoto can't identify a face:

That's a vintage black-and-white photo of Nora and Ginger's grandfather, but the computer can't find any faces in it. Do people, like computers, use color to help decide whether something they see is a face? Humans are excellent at identifying colors, and while faces can be many colors, there are also many colors that are very rarely seen in faces (e.g. blue, green, orange). Could we use skin-tones to help identify faces?

Markus Bindemann and Mike Burton created a set of images with faces placed in random locations, like this: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Bindemann, M., & Burton, A.M. (2009) The Role of Color in Human Face Perception. Cognitive Science, 1144-1156. info:/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01035.x

November 17, 2009
05:28 PM
369 views

Men often treat their friends better than women do

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Who's more "sociable," men or women? Common sense says it's women, right? And many research studies back this impression up: Women are more interpersonal, more connected, more interdependent than men. Women are more likely to share intimate information with each other than men. But is that really the whole story?

There is also research suggesting that men have larger social networks than women do, and that male-male friendships last longer than female-female ones.

A team led by Joyce Benenson conducted a set of three studies that may shed some light on the question. In their first study, they identified 30 male and 30 female undergraduates at a small, Northeastern U.S. college. Half of each group was specifically recruited because they said they had some kind of conflict with their roommate. The other half said they were planning on living with their roommate for the rest of the school year. Each student was asked to rate their satisfaction with their roommate on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 4 or 5 was defined by the researchers as "satisfied." So were there gender differences? Here are the results:

The male students were significantly more likely to be satisfied with their roommates than female students, whether or not they had a conflict with their roommate. The students also rated their roommates on social interaction, interests, values, and hygiene, and male students gave significantly higher ratings for their roommates than females for every category except hygiene.

In a second study, the researchers surveyed three separate institutions to see how frequently male and female students requested to change roommates. Here are those results:
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Benenson, J., Markovits, H., Fitzgerald, C., Geoffroy, D., Flemming, J., Kahlenberg, S., & Wrangham, R. (2009) Males' Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers. Psychological Science, 20(2), 184-190. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02269.x

November 12, 2009
05:31 PM
512 views

The long-term effects of day-care

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

When we were getting ready to have our first child, I decided that I would quit my job, work out of home as a freelancer, and take care of our baby while Greta finished graduate school.

That worked well for about two years, but by the time Nora was born, we decided to hire a part-time nanny so I could finish a degree of my own. When Nora was one and Greta and I were starting new jobs in a new state, both kids entered full-time day care, and that was our child-care arrangement until they started kindergarten.

Naturally, at every step along the way, we wondered whether we were making the right parenting decisions. We liked their nanny and their day-care center, but wouldn't it be better for the kids to be cared for full-time by their own parents? At that time, there wasn't a whole lot of research pointing one way or another. The definitive child-care study can probably never be done: Families would have to be randomly assigned to day-care centers or parent care for years, and then the impact of the assignments wouldn't be known until the children reached adulthood. Even then, you wouldn't know if the effects were due to particular parenting or day-care practices, or to the day-care versus parent-care assignment.

Realistically, the next best thing you can do is to follow children from birth to adulthood, and see if kids who happened to have been placed in day care (or with nannies, or grandparents, or some other arrangement) ended up better- or worse-off than those cared for by their mothers. Indeed, such a study was launched by the National Institute of Child Health and Development in the early 1990s. The results have been gradually trickling in as the children in the study aged. The most recent installment, published in 2007, covers kids through the sixth grade.

The study follows over 1,000 children who were randomly selected on their day of birth from ten U.S. hospitals. Researchers checked in intermittently with the families over the next dozen years, assessing both their family situation and the child care provided. Then when the kids entered school, they tracked their progress, got teacher reports on their social behavior, and continued to monitor the quality of their parenting (in addition to whether the kids were in after-school care programs). Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Belsky, J., Vandell, D., Burchinal, M., Clarke-Stewart, K., McCartney, K., & Owen, M. (2007) Are There Long-Term Effects of Early Child Care?. Child Development, 78(2), 681-701. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01021.x

November 10, 2009
05:09 PM
459 views

Do chimps understand what Jon Stewart (or another chimp) believes?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Take a look at this video from last night's episode of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show."

If you'd like, you can skip past all the political snark to the 4:47 mark to watch Jon bring cognitive psychology into prime time (or at least latenight cable)! That's right; you saw it: Jon Stewart mentioned the psychological concept of "object permanence" on national TV. Object permanence was introduced by Jean Piaget as a way of measuring the growing cognitive ability of children. Three-month-olds don't have it; most 6-month-olds do. More recently, researchers have investigated similar milestones in animals. Parrots, it turns out, have object permanence, as do chimpanzees. Insects don't.

But what about higher-order cognitive functions? Do chimps understand that others have thoughts distinct from their own? Humans understand this around the age of 1, but the evidence is less clear with chimps. Some chimps will beg for food from a blindfolded human. Does this mean they don't "know" the human can't see them? Perhaps not, but normally a chimp doesn't expect to communicate with a human. When two chimps are in two separate rooms, but can see into a third room where food is being hidden, the subordinate chimp will behave differently if she knows the dominant chimp saw the food being hidden. This suggests chimps do understand that other chimps have different thoughts from their own. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

KAMINSKI, J., CALL, J., & TOMASELLO, M. (2008) Chimpanzees know what others know, but not what they believe. Cognition, 109(2), 224-234. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.08.010

November 5, 2009
04:20 PM
515 views

What's the best way to take a study break?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

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 between, say, the Hitchcock fest at one theater and the Kurosawa marathon at the other.

Still, studying was the primary focus of campus life. There may have been five fraternities, but there were 30 coffee shops on campus. We didn't have "parties," we had "study breaks." But one thing we never managed to do while we were there was figure out what the most effective study break might be. When you're studying during nearly every free moment, what's the best way to clear up your mind and refocus yourself for the next round of studying?

One old idea that has re-emerged recently is called "attention restoration theory", or ART. William James actually discussed a similar concept in his 1892 psychology textbook. The idea that taking a walk in the woods can help you refocus your thoughts is at least as old as Immanuel Kant, and probably older. But how exactly does interacting with nature help focus attention? ART says that the natural world engages your attention in a bottom-up fashion, by features of the environment (e.g. a sunset, a beautiful tree). The artificial world demands active attention, to avoid getting hit by cars or to follow street signs. Since intellectual activities like studying or writing also demand the same kind of attention, taking a break in the artificial world doesn't really function like a rest.

Marc Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan wanted to see if they could measure the effect of ART. They paid 38 student volunteers to do a backwards digit-span task. The volunteers were given sequences of 3 to 9 numeric digits and had to repeat them in reverse, so if the experimenter said "6-1-9" then the student would say "9-1-6". After 14 tests (two of each length), the students took an hour-long walk either through an arboretum, or through downtown Ann Arbor. Then the digit-span test was repeated. Did a walk through nature improve the digit-span score? Here are the results: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Berman, M., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008) The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting With Nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207-1212. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02225.x

Felsten, G. (2009) Where to take a study break on the college campus: An attention restoration theory perspective. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 29(1), 160-167. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2008.11.006

November 3, 2009
02:34 PM
448 views

Anime film characters: Do we perceive the intended race, or our own?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

One of my favorite cartoons as a child was "Speed Racer." It featured an all-American boy (first name, "Speed," last name, "Racer") engaging in that most American of pastimes: driving fast cars. Except that "Speed Racer" wasn't really American; it was made in Japan, and the original Japanese voices were crudely overdubbed in English. Perhaps I can be excused for not noticing the Japanese origins of the show -- I was only 10 years old. Even now, as an adult looking back at those cartoons, the characters do seem awfully American-looking. Or perhaps that's just my Caucasian bias.

Does everyone see a little bit of themselves in animated cartoon characters? Or do the artists actually draw the characters to look more generic, less racially distinctive? There have been few studies about the perceived race and ethnicity of animated cartoon characters, and none focusing on the unique Japanese anime style.

So Amy Shirong Lu randomly selected 341 main characters out of 3,098 anime films made between 1958 and 2005. Each image was carefully edited to depict only a head-on, facial portrait-style picture. All clothing and background images were edited out, like this:

The character depicted here is Asuka Langley Soryu, from the movie Neon Genesis Evangelion, and of mixed Japanese and German descent. Lu recruited 1,046 people to view a randomly-selected set of 90 of the pictures and judge the characters' race based on the features depicted in the pictures. The animators' intended race of each character was judged based on the promotional materials for the film, or watching the movie itself. Still, in 125 of the cases, it was either impossible to determine the character's race or the character was of mixed ancestry. About half of all the characters were intended to be Asian, while only about 10 percent were Caucasian. Did the viewers responses match the actual race of the characters? Here are the results: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

Lu, A.S. (2009) What Race Do They Represent and Does Mine Have Anything to Do with It? Perceived Racial Categories of Anime Characters. Animation, 4(2), 169-190. DOI: 10.1177/1746847709104647

October 29, 2009
04:22 PM
430 views

Are older kids and adolescents really as good as adults at recognizing emotions in faces?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Take a look at this face:

Does it look more angry or fearful? It may be rather difficult to tell: About fifty percent of adults say faces like this are angry and fifty percent say it's fearful. However, for children, the story is different. Researchers have found that small children aren't as good as adults at recognizing emotions in faces. Young children would see this picture as more fearful than angry. However, most research has suggested that kids are just about as good as adults by the time they're five years old.

But neuroscientists have consistently found that the portions of the brain responsible for processing key emotions, particularly anger and fear, continue to develop all the way through adolescence. If our brains are still changing, shouldn't we see some impact in the way kids and teens perceive emotions?

A team led by Laura Thomas felt that earlier studies of children's perception of emotion were flawed because the tests were too easy. Instead of viewing subtle emotional variations like the photo above, kids saw dramatic, obvious facial expressions -- even schematic diagrams of emotions. Could it be that what's developing as kids mature into teenagers and adults is their ability to detect subtle emotional variations?

Thomas's team showed 102 children, teens, and adults pictures of 10 different actors which had been previously rated as expressing anger, fear, or a neutral emotion. But instead of showing the most obvious emotional expressions, they used morphing software to show the viewers gradations of the emotions, like this:
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Thomas, L., De Bellis, M., Graham, R., & LaBar, K. (2007) Development of emotional facial recognition in late childhood and adolescence. Developmental Science, 10(5), 547-558. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00614.x

October 28, 2009
06:18 PM
482 views

Product placements in movies: When they work, and when they don't

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

Product placements in movies and TV shows are becoming so commonplace that my kids now cynically take note of them whenever they appear. It wasn't always that way. In 1982 when I first saw E.T. I had no idea that Elliott's use of Reeses' Pieces to lure E.T. into his home was part of a clever marketing ploy that had been pre-arranged with the multinational conglomerate selling the candy. Now that nearly every household has a DVR allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials, advertisers are relying more and more heavily on product placement to show off their wares. But how effective are product placements in getting their message to customers?

There hasn't actually been a lot of published research on product placement, since marketing firms like to keep that information to themselves. And the research that has been done may not be realistic enough to draw useful conclusions: In one study, a researcher used low-production-value films created in the laboratory to test the efficacy of product placements, but that may not tell us much about how people respond to products in slick Hollywood productions. In other studies, a distinction wasn't made between products that simply appeared in a movie and ones that were important to the storyline. From these studies we know that people do tend to remember the brands they see in a movie, but we can't say much about how a particular product's placement makes a difference.

Moonhee Yang and David Roskos-Ewoldsen showed 373 students from the University of Alabama one of 15, 20-minute movie clips taken from major Hollywood films. Around the middle of each clip was a single product placement of interest. These products had been pre-selected by a preference panel to be roughly equally appealing. Another panel assessed the importance of the product in the movie's storyline by placing it in one of three categories: Background (not important to story), Used by Character, and Story Connection (meaning the product was actually related to the plot of the movie). This table lists all the products and films in the study:

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Yang, M., & Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. (2007) The Effectiveness of Brand Placements in the Movies: Levels of Placements, Explicit and Implicit Memory, and Brand-Choice Behavior. Journal of Communication, 57(3), 469-489. DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00353.x

October 22, 2009
04:52 PM
463 views

What does it take to get kids to eat healthy foods?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

When Jim and Nora were in elementary school, both Greta and I worked challenging jobs, so we did whatever we could to save time. Instead of bringing lunches made by their parents, the kids bought hot meals at school. The school was proud of its cafeteria. Kids had credit accounts, which meant they didn't have to carry lunch money to school (thus making them less of a target for bullies). The children were encouraged to make "healthy choices" instead of just getting a ladleful of mystery meat plopped on their trays.

After a few billing cycles, however, we noticed that Jim was spending more and more money. A complete lunch was supposed to cost about $3.50, but his bill was nearly $50 a week! We asked the cafeteria what he was buying and a printout was sent home. Here's a typical day's meal:

Chocolate milk (2)
Hamburger
French Fries (2)
Jello (3)

Needless to say, Greta and I soon resigned ourselves to making lunches for the kids. While "healthy choices" sounds appealing, if these were the choices our child was making, then we were going to choose for him.

Parents want their children to make good food choices -- we can't be there to decide for them all the time -- but we also want them to eat well now, even when they don't seem capable of making healthy decisions. And of course not all parents have the time or even the capacity to make good decisions for their kids, so for decades, the school lunch has been thought to be an important key to getting kids to eat better.

Unfortunately, many programs designed to get kids to eat well have failed. If children are rewarded for eating good foods, then what happens when they aren't being rewarded? Requiring them to eat a certain amount fruits and vegetables can backfire: even if kids don't mind the taste, too much of anything eventually ends up being unappealing. Comprehensive educational programs sometimes work, but require so much parent and teacher involvement that they aren't always practical.

So Helen Hendy, Keith Williams, and Thomas Camise devised a simpler approach: give kids a choice of fruits and vegetables in addition to their preferred meats, carbs, and milk, and reward them for eating even a little bit. They trained experimenters to observe 346 first-, second-, and fourth-graders for 6 days to see what fruits and vegetables they ate when given a choice of one of two fruits and one of two vegetables. Just one-eighth of a cup was considered a serving.
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HENDY, H., WILLIAMS, K., & CAMISE, T. (2005) “Kids Choice” School lunch program increases children's fruit and vegetable acceptance. Appetite, 45(3), 250-263. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2005.07.006

October 20, 2009
05:45 PM
496 views

Watch that hybrid! Can sound help us spot objects?

by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily

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 and crosswalks: if they can't hear us, they might not notice us at all, and if we don't see them, someone could get hurt. Now some states are actually considering legislation requiring cars to make noise even while idling or moving at low speeds.

But how much does noise help us spot objects? Aren't pedestrians supposed to look for cars, not just listen for them? Aren't drivers supposed to look for hazards, not hear them? Indeed, there has been some research suggesting that sounds do help us locate objects. However, most of this research has been on directional sounds -- a sound from the right helps us spot an object on the right side of the computer screen (for an exception, see this post). Does a sound that's not from a particular direction still help us notice a change?

A team led by Toemme Noesselt flashed images using an extra fast-response computer display to flash images at 16 volunteers. The displays looked something like
this movie (click on the image to play):

For each trial, viewers had to say whether the top or the bottom ring of dots disappeared. It's easy in this version because your computer display is probably not fast enough to show the actual flashes. In the actual experiment, viewers were first tested to determine how quick a flash they could spot. Usually this was around 15 milliseconds (the flash in my movie, for comparison, was 100 milliseconds). Then they were shown movies like mine, where either the central cross changed to a circle to cue viewers that one of the rings of dots were disappearing, or a tone was played while the ring disappeared, or nothing cued them. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

NOESSELT, T., BERGMANN, D., HAKE, M., HEINZE, H., & FENDRICH, R. (2008) Sound increases the saliency of visual events. Brain Research, 157-163. DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2007.12.060

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