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by Cognitive Daily

Implicit attitudes: Are we biased about the foods we buy?

November 26, 2008 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily

(This entry was originally posted in May, 2006) We’ve discussed implicit attitudes on Cognitive Daily before , but never in the context of food. The standard implicit attitude task asks you to identify items belonging to two different categories. Consider the following lists. Use your mouse to click on items which are either pleasant or related to Genetically Modified foods (GM foods). (Clicking won’t actually do anything, it’s just a way of self-monitoring your progress) Horrible Good Transgenic Nasty Crops Wonderful dislike GE livestock Now with this next list, do the same task, only click on items which are either unpleasant or related to GM foods. Happy Bad GM plants Likeable Engineered salmon Terrible Modified tomatoes Excellent Which task was harder? I’m including a poll below the fold for you to register your results. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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by BrainAndBehaviour

Attack of the Nerds from Outer Space [The Intersection]

November 26, 2008 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

My latest Science Progress column, about a recent, cutting edge attempt to bring science and Hollywood together, is now up . It’s entitled, “Attack of the Nerds from Outer Space,” which should be more than enough of a teaser. You can read it here . Read the comments on this post…

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Attack of the Nerds from Outer Space [The Intersection]

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by BrainAndBehaviour

You can create a "false memory" in a fraction of a second [Cognitive Daily]

November 24, 2008 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

Boundary extension is a phenomenon we’ve discussed a lot on Cognitive Daily. It’s typically described as a memory error: We remember scenes as having bigger boundaries than what we originally saw. Take a look at these two pictures of Jim: If you only saw picture A by itself, then later you’d remember seeing a picture that looks more like picture B. If you look at them side-by-side, it’s easy to see that picture A is cropped closer than picture B, but if you see the pictures separately, then it’s likely you’ll misremember the first picture has having broader boundaries than it really has. That’s boundary extension. But how quickly does boundary extension occur? Very quickly, as this movie demonstrates: Here I’ve separated the two shots of Nora by only 1/2 second. To my eye, they don’t look any different — it’s as if I saw the same picture twice. But the second viewing (with no filler image inbetween) shows that I actually extended the boundaries. If this is repeatable, can we honestly now say that boundary extension is a “memory error”? How quickly does boundary extension actually occur? Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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by Cognitive Daily

You can create a "false memory" in a fraction of a second

November 24, 2008 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily

Boundary extension is a phenomenon we’ve discussed a lot on Cognitive Daily. It’s typically described as a memory error: We remember scenes as having bigger boundaries than what we originally saw. Take a look at these two pictures of Jim: If you only saw picture A by itself, then later you’d remember seeing a picture that looks more like picture B. If you look at them side-by-side, it’s easy to see that picture A is cropped closer than picture B, but if you see the pictures separately, then it’s likely you’ll misremember the first picture has having broader boundaries than it really has. That’s boundary extension. But how quickly does boundary extension occur? Very quickly, as this movie demonstrates: Here I’ve separated the two shots of Nora by only 1/2 second. To my eye, they don’t look any different — it’s as if I saw the same picture twice. But the second viewing (with no filler image inbetween) shows that I actually extended the boundaries. If this is repeatable, can we honestly now say that boundary extension is a “memory error”? How quickly does boundary extension actually occur? Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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by Cognitive Daily

Casual Fridays: Does having kids enhance or detract from our own childhood memories?

November 14, 2008 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily

This morning I was having a conversation with Nora about her AP European history class, and it got me thinking about my own experience taking the same class about 25 years ago (yes, kids, they did have AP classes back then). Mainly it reminded me that I can’t remember much at all about the class. I remember lots of facts about European history, but I can’t track any of them specifically to that class. But it also made me wonder if I would have thought about that class at all if it hadn’t been for Nora taking the class now. On the other hand, I seem to remember my other AP classes from high school better (in case you’re not familiar with the US high school curriculum, an AP class is a “college-level” class that’s taken during high school), even though Nora hasn’t taken any of those classes yet. So maybe some other factor is more important in determining what we remember from our childhood. We might have an opportunity to find out with a Casual Friday study. We’ll ask if you can remember your teachers’ names from each grade in school, and then we’ll ask a few questions about yourself — whether you have kids, how old they are, and so on. If enough people respond, we may be able to suss out whether having kids helps or hinders memory. Click here to participate You should respond whether or not you have kids — we need all sorts of respondents in order to compare the results. The study has about 15 questions; it should take about 3-5 minutes to complete. You have until Thursday, November 20 to respond. There is no limit on the number of responses. Don’t forget to return next week for the results! Read the comments on this post…

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Casual Fridays: Does having kids enhance or detract from our own childhood memories?

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by Vaughan

2008-11-14 Spike activity

November 14, 2008 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Do women get bitchier as they get older? Only if they’re faced with research like this, says Dr Petra . Cognitive Daily ask another one of their compelling questions: can a blind person whose vision is restored understand what she sees? Temporarily open-access special issue of Criminal Justice and Behaviour discusses pseudoscientific policing practices and beliefs. Wired asks what Facebook and steroid use have in common. I thought it was acne but apparently it’s social networks . What makes the human mind asks Harvard Magazine . At Harvard, about $10,000 a term I would say. BBC News reports on a new analysis of UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s speeches suggesting that Alzheimer’s had started to take effect before his shock resignation. Can we have consciousness without attention? Asks philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel. Psyblog reports on gift-giving experiments that suggest women react more positively than men to rubbish gifts – at least at first. At addiction centres longer treatment programs are proving key to ending the relapse-rehab cycle, reports the LA Times . USA Today reports on new research suggest that being physically punished as a child may lead to sexual problems later, although I’m not sure I’d classify a preference for S&M as a problem alongside coercion and risky sexual behaviour. Does religion make you nice? asks Slate who consider friendly atheist Scandinavians. Neurophilosophy finds a beautiful image of the brain from St Paul’s Cathedral architect Sir Christopher Wren. I think this is a working torrent of The English Surgeon possibly the greatest brain documentary ever made. The Wall Street Journal discusses new research which highlights the importance of forgetting . The French Foreign Legion have advertised this for years of course. Stanley Fish for the New York Times blog discusses why it took US psychologists so long to ban participation in torture . Frontal Cortex discusses new research finding that a bad night’s sleep can increase the chance of false memories . The excellent Somatosphere discusses the culture changes that have meant social anxiety disorder is now more widely diagnosed in France. Boo Yaa! Karl Friston drops some Bayes-heavy block-rocking maths in an article for PLoS Computational Biology on hierarchical models in the brain. Speed daters shallow, reports New Scientist . The BPS Research Digest discusses research on the negative effect of pregnancy on memory for future events. Late stage Huntingdon’s disease includes better auditory signal detection, according to research covered by The Neurocritic .

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2008-11-14 Spike activity

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by Cognitive Daily

How, exactly, do sad faces affect our ability to count?

November 13, 2008 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily

Remember this video? A few weeks ago we used it to demonstrate that facial expressions can disrupt the perceptual system in fundamental ways. Actually, because we could only show a few short clips, we weren’t able to duplicate the research results found by John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle. But in their, more comprehensive study, although viewers were instructed only to count “upturned arcs” or “downturned arcs,” when those arcs formed “faces” with negative expressions, people counted the arcs slower and less accurately. But how exactly do facial expressions disrupt the perceptual system? Is it something automatic and irreversible? Or can we create a situation where facial expression doesn’t matter? A new team, again led by Eastwood, tackled this question with three ingenious experiments. In the first experiment, volunteers were shown dozens of movies like the one above, and again asked to count upturned and downturned arcs. But this time, there was a critical difference. In half the movies, the arcs they were supposed to count were colored red, while the other arcs were gray, like this: The other movies were just like the example above, with no color difference in the arcs. Did coloring the arcs have an impact? Here are the results: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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How, exactly, do sad faces affect our ability to count?

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by Vaughan

Neuroscience In Our Time

November 13, 2008 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

BBC Radio 4′s excellent discussion programme In Our Time just had an interesting edition on neuroscience – what it does, how it does it, and what it’s telling us about the function of the mind and brain. It’s generally a very interesting discussion, although does get a bit confused towards the end during a discussion of conscious – largely due to a misunderstanding of a famous study. The discussion touches on neuroscientist Adrian Owen’s study where they wanted to find out whether a patient in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) was conscious by asking them to imagine things and then using fMRI to see if the relevant parts of the brain were active – in other words, if the person was able to consciously hear, understand and carry out the request. Famously, the patient could – demonstrating that it is possible to be diagnosed with PVS and still be conscious. However, the guests on the programme discuss the study as if the patient was unconscious and was in a coma, and suggest that this shows the brain can do remarkable things when someone is unconscious which is exactly what it didn’t show. Otherwise, a fascinating discussion as we’d expect from In Our Time . Link to programme webpage and audio.

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by Vaughan

The not very near death experience

November 10, 2008 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

I’ve just discovered this fantastic 1990 study from The Lancet that investigated near death experiences reported by patients. However, it did something quite different from most other studies – it actually checked to see whether the patients were actually near death or not – and many of them weren’t. The study looked at the experiences of 58 people who believed they were about to die during a medical procedure and had subsequently reported a ‘ near death experience ‘ – often the classic ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ experience, the feeling of the consciousness had left the body like an outside observer, enhanced clarity of thought and the flashback of life’s memories. The researchers then looked through the medical records of each person to see whether they had really been ‘near death’. Of the 58 in the study, 30 patients were never in danger of dying, despite their belief at the time. The study then went on to compare whether certain experiences were more likely to appear in those patients who were genuinely near death. The experiences were largely the same across both groups, but those who were really at risk of dying were more likely to experience an intense light and enhanced mental clarity. The authors say they’re not sure why this might be. The explanation that is usually thrown around is that ‘restricted oxygen to the brain causes light sensations’ but I’ve no idea whether this is anything more than a convenient hypothesis and has any scientific data to back it up. Link to study paper. Link to PubMed entry.

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Links for Shireen Campbell’s class

November 10, 2008 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily

Today I’m visiting Shireen Campbell’s class at Davidson College to talk about Cognitive Daily and other writing projects. This post collects the links I’ll be using for class. If you’re not in the class they might not be relevant to you, but they include some of our most popular posts, so maybe you’ll enjoy reading them too! Violent video games may be linked to aggression More on video game violence Is 17 the “most random” number? How to report scientific research to a general audience How we learn to walk Dave’s first blog Dave’s personal blog For more, new links about psychology and neuroscience, visit this week’s Encephalon at HighlightHEALTH. Read the comments on this post…

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Links for Shireen Campbell’s class

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