Cognitive Daily

Cognitive Daily Closes Shop after a Fantastic Five-Year Run

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:57:56 -0500

Five years ago today, we made the first post that would eventually make its way onto a blog called Cognitive Daily. We thought we were keeping notes for a book, but in reality we were helping build a network that represented a new way of sharing psychology with the world. Cognitive Daily wasn't the first psychology blog, but clearly it filled an important niche, because within a year, we were receiving over 30,000 page views a month. Now we often get over 100,000 page views a month, and we've totaled over four million. We reach many more people than would ever have bought our book, and we've made many people aware that psychology is much more than Sigmund Freud.

Now, it's time to say goodbye to that. We are permanently closing Cognitive Daily, and this will be our last post.

While we won't be here, we've seen a number of exceptional psychology blogs join us in sharing the science of psychology with the world, and we encourage you to visit them. Rather than single any of these blogs out, we ask that you visit Dave's ongoing project, ResearchBlogging.org. There, by clicking on the "Psychology" and "Neuroscience" channels, you can find nearly 100 blogs that regularly discuss peer-reviewed research in the same fields we've been covering here. You can also follow dedicated psychology and neuroscience RSS feeds, or the @researchblogs twitter feed, to get an even broader view of what's going on in the world of science.

We're grateful to many, many people who have helped make Cognitive Daily great. There are too many to mention by name, but without the many scientists who provided the raw materials, the bloggers who've helped share ideas, and the administrators and techies who've made it all work, this blog simply couldn't exist. And, of course, without our readers and commenters, Cognitive Daily probably wouldn't have been around for more than a few months. You've inspired us, motivated us, corrected us, disputed us, informed us, and responded to more polls and surveys than we ever imagined possible. We hope you'll continue to find Cognitive Daily useful; the archives will remain here for all to see.

What will we do with all that time we've freed up? Greta plans to continue her work as Professor of Psychology at Davidson College, teaching and mentoring students, conducting research, and sharing her love of music, literature, and art. Dave will continue as editor of ResearchBlogging.org and weekly columnist for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, and he'll maintain his personal blog, Word Munger and his obsessively-updated Twitter account. ~~In addition, Dave's planning a new project, to be unveiled within the next few weeks. Look for more information about it on Twitter and Word Munger.~~ In addition, Dave's now launched a new blog, The Daily Monthly. Check there for a new post every day, a new topic each month.

Thanks again for being a part of Cognitive Daily. It's been an amazing ride.

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Both musicians and non-musicians can perceive bitonality

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:48:15 -0500

Take a listen to this brief audio clip of "Unforgettable."

Aside from the fact that it's a computer-generated MIDI performance, do you hear anything unusual?

If you're a non-musician like me, you might not have noticed anything. It sounds basically like the familiar song, even though the synthesized sax isn't nearly as pleasing as the familiar Nat King Cole version of the song. But most trained musicians can't listen to a song like this without cringing. Why? Because the music has been made "bitonal" by moving the accompanying piano part up two semitones (a semitone is the difference between a "natural" note and a sharp or flat). Here's the original, unaltered piece:

Can you tell the difference? A 2000 study led by R.S. Wolpert found that non-musicians couldn't distinguish between monotonal and bitonal music played side-by-side. Meanwhile musicians found artificially-created bitonal music to be almost unlistenable. For most non-musicians, if they heard anything wrong with the clips, they typically said they were being played too fast, or mentioned some other unrelated concept.

But Mayumi Hamamoto, Mauro Bothelo, and Margaret Munger (AKA Greta) wondered if years of musical training were really necessary for non-musicians to hear bitonal music. Bitonality is actually a bit controversial in the world of music, and it can be a little hard to define. In principle, there's a difference between bitonality and just playing or singing off-key, but in practice, the difference may not even exist. Advocates of bitonality like to point to the works of composers like Milhaud, Bartók, Prokofiev, and Strauss. These composers deliberately wrote in two different musical keys. But how is that different from occasionally or regularly writing dissonant chords? After all, all the same notes can be written using any musical key. To be truly bitonal, advocates say the two separate parts must unfold independently in different keys. This results in a distinctive "crunch" when the music is played. The separate question is, is this noticeable? Wolpert's work shows that it is, at least for trained musicians.

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Synesthesia and the McGurk effect

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:05:39 -0500

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:

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Does watching TV really kill you?

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:58:09 -0500

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.

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The outfielder problem: The psychology behind catching fly balls

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:22:17 -0500

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:

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Picks and interviews from ResearchBlogging.org

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:24:27 -0500

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 explaining why that happens. Actually, says Christian Jarrett, there has been little research into the phenomenon. Jarrett discusses one of the few studies shedding light on the phenomenon
Bronwyn Thompson, the pain-management expert, has recently undergone surgery. Now she's blogging about her own experiences managing pain during recovery. And as a bonus, she's discussing a fascinating study about women's experiences with self-pain-management.
Finally, Scicurious gives us a holiday-themed post about a fascinating phenomenon: A patient who can remember and work with some numbers, but not others. What's the difference? Read When Dec 25th Isn't Christmas Day to find out.

Also, over on Seedmagazine.com, I interview four of our content editors to find out how they select notable posts in each of their areas of expertise. They also look back at their favorite posts of 2009, and give some insight into the future of science online.

Click here to read the whole interview on Seedmagazine.com.

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

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:15:50 -0500

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 inauthentic 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.

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Wine and taste: Wine labels also affect our opinions of the food we eat

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:55:37 -0500

[Originally published in November 2007]

Both Greta and I are big wine fans. Despite Jonah's recent extremely popular post, I, at least, believe that I can tell the difference between good and bad wines. I'm still convinced that a good wine is more than just an attractive label (though I'm a sucker for labels with Zinfandel puns like "Zen of Zin" or "Amazin"). That said, the research suggesting that labeling has a lot to do with wine preference is also quite convincing.

Several studies suggest that we expect to prefer wines from certain vineyards or regions, and in many cases wine drinkers will actually rate the identical wine higher when it's presented in a fancier bottle. These results apply not only to wine, but to a variety of foods. Restaurateurs have known this for years, placing special emphasis on the presentation of the food in addition to the actual preparation and ingredients.

So if presentation matters, then perhaps the presentation of wine could actually affect the taste of the food it's served with. This is the premise of a study by Brian Wansink, Collin Payne, and Jill North.

In their first experiment they served 49 graduate students cheese and one of two types of wine as they arrived at a reception. The wine -- in both cases the identical cheap Cabernet -- was served in bottles labeled as being from California or North Dakota. Prior to drinking the wine, they rated its expected tastiness on a scale of 1 to 9. After sampling both wine and cheese, they rated both of them for actual taste. Here are the results:

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TV's unintended consequences -- good and bad

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:26:59 -0500

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 survey of 10,000 Americans who ranged from normal weight to obese. As you might expect, people who engaged in a lot of physical activity tended to weigh less than those who did not.
But when the researchers considered how much time these individuals spent watching TV and movies, a different pattern emerged. No matter how much TV they watched, if they didn't exercise, they had high BMIs (body mass index--a measure of obesity). But even among people who exercised more than an hour a day, those watching more than an hour of TV per day had significantly higher BMIs than those who did not. In fact, for respondents who watched more than an hour of TV, whether or not they exercised no longer predicted BMI.

And there are many other surprising correlations between TV watching and both detrimental and beneficial results. For more, read the whole article.

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Picturing language: Does it help or hinder?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:18:51 -0500

[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 about spoken language. The question: does our reaction time differ when the animation corresponds to the movement described in language?

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

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:48:30 -0500

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:

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Citizen Science: Becoming involved in serious science, even if you're not an expert

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:19:46 -0500

My column on Seedmagazine.com today explores citizen science: serious, peer-reviewed research that relies on the contributions of ordinary individuals. While the projects range from cosmology to zoology, there are plenty of psychology projects too:

Project Implicit is an ongoing series of experiments into the nature of human bias, hosted by Harvard University but incorporating research from around the world. The idea behind these studies is that people won't always overtly express their biases. For example, in most communities in the US it is socially unacceptable to be overtly racist. Even so, people often make negative assumptions about people based solely on perceived race. The implicit attitude test measures your reaction time as you categorize words, faces, or other stimuli. If you're faster to categorize a certain-race face with negative words, then it stands to reason that you may be implicitly--even unconsciously--biased against that race, though you might never admit or realize it.
The experiment I tried concerned hypothetical races, "Niffian" and "Laapian," and was conducted by Anna Newheiser of Yale University. I was immediately able to learn that I had a strong preference for one of these imaginary races. According to the website, this experiment may reveal more about how people respond to real races. Project Implicit has been responsible for dozens of research papers about bias, including this one discussed on my blog, about how children develop racial stereotypes.

The article lists other citizen science projects you can try so go ahead and read the whole thing. If you're looking for even more projects, check out Science Cheerleader's Project Finder.

Also, in case you missed it, here are my weekly picks of psychology/neuroscience posts from ResearchBlogging.org:

Mothers experience chronic pain long after their babies are delivered. The Healthskills blog discusses the shockingly high incidence of pain after caesareans and other delivery room procedures.
Acidity means anxiety ... acidity in the brain, that is. Neuroskeptic discusses research suggesting that acid levels in the amygdala have an impact on anxiety.
The relationship between height and jealosy. Your partner's height has a dramatic effect on how jealous you are, says the eHarmony Labs blog.
People are really bad at exercising self-control. I've always heard that you should never go to the grocery store hungry. This study suggests that going to the store full could also be a bad idea.

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Casual Fridays: Inside EVERYONE's studio of curse words

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:04:16 -0500

For last week's Casual Fridays study we asked respondents to answer James Lipton's famous ten questions from Inside the Actor's Studio. In case you've never seen the show, here are the questions:

What is your favorite word?
What is your least favorite word?
What turns you on?
What turns you off?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What is your favorite curse word?
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
What profession would you not like to do?
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

What we wanted to know is if we could identify any recognizable patterns in the answers. Are responses completely random, or do characteristics like age, gender, occupation, and so on, have an effect?

The short answer is "no" -- they don't have much of an effect at all. There was an incredible amount of variety in the responses. Out of 509 respondents, the most popular word, "Love" was the favorite of just 10 -- less than 2 percent of responses. There was a little more regularity with least favorite words. Topping the list was "cunt," with 24 picking it as their least favorite. But still, this represents less than 5 percent of all responses. The next four "least favorite" words were moist (20 respondents), no (16), hate (11) and fart (7). One unexpected word that garnered a large favorable response was onomatopoeia, chosen by 5 respondents as their most favorite word -- the fourth most popular word, in a tie with "thanks" and "awesome." Two respondents each chose some exceptionally unusual words: defenestrate, schadenfreude, and discombobulate. Overall, 39 words were chosen more than once as favorites, representing 115 individuals. This means nearly 400 people chose completely unique words as their favorites.

But of course, you're probably most interested in our respondents favorite curse words. Fair warning: the language gets a lot more graphic from here on out, so don't click through if you don't want to see it.

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

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:15:15 -0500

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.

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

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:17:07 -0500

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.

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