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Conventional wisdom holds that seeing someone naked makes you think of them as more of a sex object than seeing them clothed. According to a recent study, that is an oversimplification of what really happens. The human mind thinks of other people in two different dimensions: agency, or what the person observed can or will do, and experience, or what that person perceives and feels. And the amount of clothing worn changes what dimension the observer focuses on, as seen from an experiment in which people looked at pictures of faces or pictures of faces with some body skin also showing (as shown by the hunky “Aaron” shown here, or the female “Erin”).
It turns out that a glimpse of flesh strongly influences our perception of Erin/Aaron. When the pictures only showed a face, they had lots of agency. But when we saw their torso, we suddenly imagined them as obsessed with experience. Instead of being good at self-control, they were suddenly extremely sensitive to hunger and desire. Same person, same facial expression, same brief description – but a hint of body changed everything.
In another experiment, the researchers varied the volunteers’ mindsets, sometimes asking them to look at photos as if they were on an online-dating website, focusing on attractiveness, and sometimes asking them to look at the photos as if they were hiring for a professional job, focusing on the mind. Once again, thinking about how “sexy and cute” someone is – those are bodily attributes – led students to endow them with more experience and less agency. The opposite held when people were asked to evaluate intelligence and efficiency.
Read more about it at Frontal Cortex, but be warned there is no full nudity in the article. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
Marketing lore and common sense tells us we value the things we make more than the things we buy already made. That even holds true when we assemble things from a kit, according to research published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Experiment 1A: Participants either inspected an IKEA pre-built box or assembled it themselves. Afterward, they were asked to bid on the box they had either seen or built. If their bid was above a random number, they would pay that amount to keep the box; if it was lower, they couldn’t keep it. Participants were also asked to self-report on the value of the box. An effect was found in both cases; on average, participants bid 62% more when they built the box versus when they simply inspected it. On average, participants also self-reported liking the self-built box more than the inspected boxes.
Other experiments used origami creations and LEGO sets, and the same effect was noted. Read more about it at NeoAcademic. Link -via Boing Boing
Brain scanning technology is teaching us how very versatile or brains are. For example, what is happening in the visual cortices of people who have been blind since birth? A series of experiments in which blind subjects were monitored while performing different linguistic exercises show that those parts of our brains are put to work for other tasks!
In the brains of people blind from birth, structures used in sight are still put to work — but for a very different purpose. Rather than processing visual information, they appear to handle language.
Linguistic processing is a task utterly unrelated to sight, yet the visual cortex performs it well.
“It suggests a kind of plasticity that’s even broader than the kinds observed before,” said Marina Bedny, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s a really drastic change. It suggests there isn’t a predetermined function an area can serve. It can take a wide range of possible functions.”
Brains: use ‘em if you got ‘em! Link
Designer John Leung from ClarkeHopkinsClarke Architects presents the “Bias of Thoughts” Bookshelf. How does this illusion work? You can figure it out by seeing pictures of the bookshelf from different angles and a video as well at the Neatorama Spotlight Blog. Link
The old parlor trick of staring at yourself in a mirror until your face starts to change has now been studied scientifically. Giovanni Caputo led a study in which 50 people tried the trick and reported their reactions.
At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included: (a) huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); (b) a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; (c) an unknown person (28%); (d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); (e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); (f ) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).
Have you ever tried this? The effect can be really creepy, like this video example from Lasse Gjertsen (in Norwegain, but may sound NSFW). The entire article is available as a pdf, or you can read a summary at Mind Hacks. Link -via Metafilter
When you see the moon rising or setting over the landscape, it seems so big and close that you could reach out and touch it. Then a couple of hours later when it’s high in the sky, it seems so much smaller! Why does the moon look so huge on the horizon? The moon stays the same, but your brain experiences an optical illusion.
One of my favorite brain-benders is the Ponzo Illusion. You’ve seen it: the simplest case is with two short horizontal lines, one above the other, between two slanting but near-vertical lines. The upper line looks longer than the lower line, even though they’re the same length.
The illusion works because our brains are a bit wonky. The slanted lines make us think that anything near the top is farther away; the lines force our brain to think those lines are parallel but receding in the distance (like railroad tracks). The two horizontal lines are physically the same length, but our brain thinks the upper one is farther away. If it’s farther away, then duh, our brain says to itself, it must be bigger than the lower one. So we perceive it that way.
See examples of how this works at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
Is there something in our brains that make humans see the same geometric patterns during drug use, illness, or near-death experiences? Even pressing on our eyes can induce the same spirals other people see. Research by professor of Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience Paul Bressloff and his colleagues at Oxford shows that these patterns are formed in the first visual field of the brain, or V1.
An object or scene in the visual world is projected as a two-dimensional image on the retina of each eye, so what we see can also be treated as flat sheet: the visual field. Every point on this sheet can be pin-pointed by two coordinates, just like a point on a map, or a point on the flat model of V1. The alternating regions of light and dark that make up a geometric hallucination are caused by alternating regions of high and low neural activity in V1 — regions where the neurons are firing very rapidly and regions where they are not firing rapidly.
A closer look at the types of specialized neurons in the V1 field and how they interact with each other explains the geometric patterns.
Bressloff and his colleagues used a generalised version of the equations from the original model to let the system evolve. The result was a model that is not only more accurate in terms of the anatomy of V1, but can also generate geometric patterns in the visual field that the original model was unable to produce. These include lattice tunnels, honeycombs and cobwebs that are better characterised in terms of the orientation of contours within them, than in terms of contrasting regions of light and dark.
That’s about as simple as I can make it in a short blurb; the entire article explains it better. Yes, there is math involved. Link -via Metafilter
According to a new study published in Nature, our skin helps us decipher the sounds we hear with our ears. Blindfolded volunteers listened to the “pa”, “ta”, “da”, and “ba” sounds. Unknown to the participant, a puff of air, softer than would be felt in normal conversation, accompanied some of the sounds. Sometimes the puff of air accompanied the appropriate sounds, at other times not.
The researchers found that if there was no air puff, participants misheard “pa” for “ba” and “ta” for “da” 30 to 40 percent of the time. The accuracy improved 10 to 20 percent when an air puff over the hand or neck accompanied “pa” and “ta.” No improvement occurred, however, if an air puff was sent through the tube in the ear, suggesting that the participants were not simply hearing the airflow.
The opposite effect was observed when the participants received an air puff with the inappropriate sounds— “ba” and “da.” While subjects correctly identified these sounds in about 80 percent of cases when played without the release of air, the accuracy decreased by about 10 percent if the sounds were accompanied by puffs of air.
Most of the volunteers were not consciously aware of the puffs of air. Link
A team led by psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland found that visual illusions that befuddle adults don’t effect children as easily. The pair of orange circles in the above illusion are slightly different in size. The blue dots will either accentuate those differences, or mislead the eye into thinking they are bigger or smaller than they are. In an experiment, participants of different ages were asked to identify the circle that looked bigger.
For 4- to 6-year-olds, accuracy of size perception for misleading images remained at about what it was for control images. Misleading images increasingly elicited errors from older children and tricked adults most of the time. Adults made almost no errors on helpful images. Kids from age 7 to 10 erred on a minority of helpful images, while 4- to 6-year-olds performed no better than chance.
The results suggest that considering context in images is something we learn as we age. Link
