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Fri, 03 Feb 2012 The complex relationship between memory and silence
People who suffer a traumatic experience often don't talk about it, and many forget it over time. But not talking about something doesn't always mean you'll forget it; if you try to force yourself not to think about white bears, soon you'll be imagining polar bears doing the polka. A group of psychological scientists explore the relationship between silence and memories.
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 Placebo effect: New study shows how to boost the power of pain relief, without drugs
Placebos reduce pain by creating an expectation of relief. Distraction -- say, doing a puzzle -- relieves it by keeping the brain busy. But do they use the same brain processes? Neuromaging suggests they do. When applying a placebo, scientists see activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain that controls high-level cognitive functions like working memory and attention -- which is what you use to do that distracting puzzle.
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 To make a social robot, key is satisfying the human mind
Understanding the human mind is the key to social robotics, and researchers describe what we can expect from this field in the future.
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 Schizophrenia: When hallucinatory voices suppress real ones, new electronic application may help
When a patient afflicted with schizophrenia hears inner voices something is taking place inside the brain that prevents the individual from perceiving real voices. A simple electronic application may help the patient learn to shift focus.
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 How to tell apart the forgetful from those at risk of Alzheimer’s disease
It can be difficult to distinguish between people with normal age-associated memory loss and those with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). However people with aMCI are at a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and identification of these people would mean that they could begin treatment as early as possible. New research shows that specific questions, included as part of a questionnaire designed to help diagnose AD, are also able to discriminate between normal memory loss and aMCI.
BPS Research Digest Blog
Feast
Our round-up of the latest and best psych and neuro links:
This Saturday it's a family fun day - Meet Your Brain - at the Royal Institution in London.
A masterful, moving long-form essay and love story about the use of virtual reality to treat burns victims.
Fascinating blog post from Jason Goldman on how women eat at the same pace as their eating companion and eat a similar amount.
Asperger's syndrome is supposed to be a diagnosis you have for life. Meet Benjamin Nugent, novelist and lecturer. He does not have Asperger's. However back in the late 90's he was diagnosed with Asperger's and appeared in a video made by his psychologist Mum called "Understanding Asperger's". Now he's written a piece for the New York Times "I had Asperger's" calling for the diagnostic criteria for Autistic Spectrum Disorders to be narrowed.
The Association of Psychological Science are launching a new journal Clinical Psychological Science - submissions accepted from Spring.
Willpower guru Roy Baumeister can't resist appearing almost everywhere. Read his interview with The Atlantic and take part in a survey he's conducting with New Scientist.
The Guardian are hosting their first ever open weekend in March. Sunday 25th March has a "neuroscience and the law" theme with talks and debates.
Self portraits of a declining brain.
A study that involved decoding words a person had heard from their brain activity provoked a blitz of media coverage. My favourite was Mo Costandi's report for Nature News. On his Guardian blog he also reproduces a report he wrote on a similar study published in 2009, which decoded signals from Broca's area, revealing sub-areas involved in both language production and comprehension.
Group brainstorming has come in for a lot bad press in recent years (e.g. see the New Yorker's recent"Brainstorming doesn't really work" article). On his Work Matters blog Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton comes to brainstorming's defence.
If work psychology is your bag, our sister blog The Occupational Digest has recently published the last of its evidence-based tips for improving your workplace practices - here's a handy menu of all the advice.
Plenty of psychology at the Brighton Science Festival, which kicked off this month.
Salon has an interview with Shimon Edelman, a psychologist and author of the new book: “The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life.”
A new amnesiac movie is coming to UK screens later this month.
Vote for psychology studies that you'd like to see replicated.
New TEDx talk - the sociology and neuroscience of humour.
Free journal issues from BPS Journals: latest issue of British Journal of Clinical Psychology and latest issue of British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology.
Dan Ariely and Malcolm Gladwell chat about writing about psychology research for a mass audience (includes link to podcast).
Read in DEEP VOICE: Why are the voice overs on movie trailers always delivered by men?
Jonathan Haidt on the tribal psychology of politics.
Brian Mossop has reviewed Haidt's new book (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion) for Scientific American Mind.
Joy of Stats BBC documentary is now available online in full.
Alison Gopnik on the teenage brain.
Are we ready for a morality pill? A question prompted by a new study that appeared to show signs of empathy in rats.
January's Neuropod podcast is waiting to be downloaded.
That's all, enjoy your weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
2012-02-02 Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?
David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online - most (70 per cent) were based in Europe, others were from North America, Asia and beyond. There were 207 women and the age range was from 18 to 63. Participants answered questions about the way they used Facebook and Twitter and which site they preferred. They also answered questions about their personality based around the "Big Five" personality factors of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Openness and Agreeableness, as well as the dimensions of sociability and "need for cognition" (this last factor is about people's need to be mentally engaged and stimulated).
Perhaps the most glaring finding is that personality actually explained little of the variance - less than 10 per cent (rising to 20 per cent alongside age) - in the way participants used these sites. This suggests that other factors not explored here, such as intelligence and motivation, have a big influence.
However, the associations with personality were interesting. People who used Facebook mostly for socialising tended to score more highly on sociability and neuroticism (consistent with past research suggesting that shy people use the site to forge social ties and combat loneliness). Social use of Twitter correlated with higher sociability and openness (but not neuroticism) and with lower scores on conscientiousness. This suggests that social Twitter users don't use it so much to combat loneliness, but more as a form of social procrastination.
What about using the sites as an informational tool? There was an intriguing divergence here. People who said they used Facebook as an informational tool tended to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and "need for cognition". Informational users of Twitter were the mirror opposite: they scored higher on conscientiousness and "need for cognition", but lower on neuroticism, extraversion and sociability. The researchers interpreted these patterns as suggesting that Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation - as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising (this was particularly true for older participants).
Finally, what about people's overall preference for Twitter or Facebook? Again, people who scored higher in "need for cognition" tended to prefer Twitter, whilst higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion tended to prefer Facebook. Simplifying the results, one might say that Facebook is the more social of the two social networking sites, whereas Twitter is more about sharing and exchanging information.
These results should be treated with caution. The sample was biased towards young females and the data were entirely self-report. Nonetheless, the findings suggest there are some meaningful differences in the personality profiles of people who prefer Twitter vs. Facebook and some intriguing personality links with the way the sites are used. "Different people use the same sites for different purposes," the researchers said.
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Hughes, D., Rowe, M., Batey, M., and Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 561-569 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.001Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
2012-02-01 When your hands are tied, your eyes are tied up too
In an intriguing new study, Ettore Ambrosini and his team tested whether these anticipatory, vicarious eye movements still occur if our hands are tied up, literally. The researchers reasoned that watching another person's reaching movement triggers the same motor programme in our own brain and it's this programme that guides our anticipatory eye movements. But if our hands are tied, they predicted, the motor programme will stall and the eye movements won't occur so much.
Fifteen participants had their eye movements recorded whilst they watched short videos of a man reaching for one of two tomatoes. Sometimes the man clenched his fist and merely touched one of the tomatoes. This fist hand-shape doesn't provide much predictive information about the kind of movement that's being planned and so participants weren't expected to show much anticipatory gaze behaviour.
In other videos, the man either made a precise, preparatory grasping shape with his fingers, as if he were going to pick up the small tomato, which is what he then did; or he made a whole-hand grasp shape, as if he were reaching for the larger tomato, which is what he went on to do. These two hand-shapes provide clues as to the reaching movement that's underway and were expected to trigger more vicarious, anticipatory eye movements in the participants.
So what actually happened? The man's hand-shapes had just the effect that the researchers predicted. When he formed a precision-shape with his fingers, or a whole-hand grabbing shape, the participants tended to glance ahead towards his intended target, more often and sooner than they did when the man formed a fist. Crucially - and this is the intriguing result - this proactive, vicarious looking behaviour was significantly diminished when the participants had their hands tied behind their backs compared with when their hands were loose in front of them. Having their hands tied seemed to somehow tie up their eyes too.
"... having tied or somehow constrained hands does not allow one to take full advantage of specific motor cues, if any, to grab [with the eyes] the target of the observed action," the researchers said. "This suggests that actions of others are processed most efficiently when we are specifically able to perform the same actions."
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Ambrosini, E., Sinigaglia, C., and Costantini, M. (2011). Tie my hands, tie my eyes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance DOI: 10.1037/a0026570
Further reading: Armchair experts have their limits.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
Cognitive Daily
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 Cognitive Daily Closes Shop after a Fantastic Five-Year Run
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.
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 Both musicians and non-musicians can perceive bitonality
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.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Thu, 14 Jan 2010 Synesthesia and the McGurk effect
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...