Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Greta Munger is Professor of Psychology at Davidson College whose works include The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions. Dave Munger now writes at The Daily Monthly. He is co-founder and editor of ResearchBlogging.org and a columnist on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. And yes, he is married to Greta.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
