Do urban environments trigger a mindset that's focused on the bigger picture?

To focus on details or the whole? This is one of the major ways that people differ in their style of mental processing. Past research has shown that people on the autism spectrum tend to focus more on details. Other studies reveal cross-cultural differences. People from collectivist cultures like Japan show a bias for focusing more on the bigger picture, known as "global processing", whilst citizens in individualist cultures like Britain show a comparatively greater bias for detail or "local processing". Now a study, led by Serge Caparos at Goldsmiths, of a remote African society, makes the case that this cultural difference is caused, not so much by degrees of collectivism or individualism, but rather by exposure to varying levels of urbanisation.

Caparos and his team used two kinds of stimuli presented on-screen to measure processing bias. The first is known as the Ebbinghaus illusion, in which the perceived size of a central circle is affected by the relative size of the circles surrounding it. A circle surrounded by bigger circles will generally be perceived as smaller, especially by people with a bias towards more global processing.

The second stimuli involved large letters comprised of little letters or shapes. Participants had to make a similarity judgement - for example, they were presented with a large X made up of little x's and had to say whether it was more similar to a large circle made up of little x's or a large X made up of little squares. People with a bias towards global processing would be expected to say the two large X's are more similar.

To gauge the effect of urbanisation, the researchers tested dozens of people from the remote Himba society of Namibia, as well as dozens of undergrads from Japan and Britain. Crucially, some of the Himba lived traditionally in village huts and homesteads whereas others had moved to, and lived for several years in, Opuwo, the Himba's only permanent, urban settlement. Also, some of the traditional Himba had visited Opuwo, either once, twice or three times.

The Japanese were more sensitive to the Ebbinghaus illusion than the Brits (indicative of a greater global processing bias, consistent with past research); the Brits, in turn, were more sensitive to it than the traditional Himba. Critically, though, the urban Himba were just as sensitive to the illusion as the British. Visits to the town Opuwo made no difference to the performance of the traditional Himba on this task.

On the similarity judgement task, the Japanese and Brits showed the most global choices, more than both groups of Himba. However, the urban Himba made more global choices than the traditional Himba and, moreover, global choices were made more often by traditional Himba who'd visited the town than those who hadn't. Indeed, just two visits to Opuwo increased global choices by ten per cent.

Age and levels of schooling made no difference to any of these results and past research has confirmed that the Himba are unfazed by testing with a computer monitor.

The more established theory for cross-cultural differences in local/global processing bias would predict that the Himba should show even more of a global processing bias than the Japanese, given the highly collectivist nature of their society. Also, this social orientation account would predict that experience of more individualistic urban living should lead to more local processing bias, not the greater global processing that was observed.

"Our proposal," the researchers said, "is that exposure to the urban environment investigated here introduced visual clutter with consequent changes in global/local processing." Their claim tallies with past research showing the opposite effect - that exposing townies to natural environments increases their bias for details.

"Further research will need to determine the processes by which cluttered visual input and/or other aspects of the urban environment come to change perceptual foci of interest in the dramatic way observed here," the researchers concluded.

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Caparos, S., Ahmed, L., Bremner, A., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K., & Davidoff, J. (2012). Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture Cognition, 122 (1), 80-85 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.08.013

Related studies covered on the Digest:

• Living in a city, or growing up in one, is associated with heightened brain sensitivity to social stress.
• Asian Americans and European Americans differ in how they see themselves in the world.
• We underestimate the benefits of nature.

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Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

What your choice of best ever footballer says about human memory

Cruijff - the best ever player?

Ask a friend to name the best ever footballer and they're likely to pick someone who was mid-career when they (your friend) was aged around 17. That's according to a new investigation into the "reminiscence bump". This term describes the fact that when you ask people to name the most memorable events in their lives, they tend to refer to things that happened to them in their teens and early twenties. Recently it's been shown that a similar effect occurs when you ask people to name their favourite music, books and films, with them tending to pick out content from their youth. Now David Rubin and his colleagues have extended this line of research to people's judgement of the best footballers of all time.

Six hundred and nineteen people (aged 16 to 80) took part in the study online, conducted in Dutch and hosted on the website of the University of Amsterdam. Participants were presented with the names of 190 all-time leading football players and asked to name their judgement of the five best players of all time. They could either select from the list or choose their own.

The researchers calculated the mid-career point of the 172 players named by the participants and compared this against the participants' age at that time. Participants overwhelming tended to name players whose career mid-point coincided with participants' teens and early twenties. The modal age (i.e. the most common) of the participants at their chosen players' mid-career was 17 years. The researchers said this was the most appropriate statistic to use because the average (22 years) and median (20 years) stats are more susceptible to the bias to name currently active players.

Another way of reporting the results is to say that participants recalled more players who were mid-career in the second decade of the participants' lives than ones who were mid-career in the participants' third decade. And they named more players from the period in which they were aged 11 to 30 than from the period in which they were aged 1 to 10 or aged 31 to 40.

Focusing on the most frequently chosen players, Johan Cruijff was most often selected by participants who were aged 9 to 18 when he was at his career midpoint; Pelé was most often selected by participants who were aged between 12 and 21 years when he was mid-career. Incidentally, currently active players who made the list of twenty most frequently chosen players were: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and David Beckham (go Becks!). Only the youngest cohort (born between 1986 to 1995) chose more players who were mid-career in 2000s than players who were mid-career in the 90s.

"The results of this study are another example of the robustness of the reminiscence bump phenomenon," the researchers said.

Several theories have been put forward to explain the reminiscence bump, including that our memories are more efficient in our teens and twenties. Others think it's because more novel things happen to us at that time of life, such as our first kiss or first job, causing them to get lodged in memory. Rubin and his team say their findings are inconsistent with this "cognitive account", as it's known, because children typically start to play and follow football between the ages of 5 and 15, so if the cognitive account were true you'd think they'd pick players who were mid-career at that time.
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Janssen, S., Rubin, D., and Conway, M. (2011). The reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of the best football players of all time: Pelé, Cruijff or Maradona? The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.606372

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The "multiple reflection error" - yet another way that we misunderstand mirrors

On her trolley! Janine, the mannequin

Considering the ubiquity of mirrors in everyday life, it's amazing how confused we are about them. For example, many of us are oblivious to the small size of our heads as they appear reflected in the mirror. A new study by Rebecca Lawson has provided a compelling demonstration of the "multiple reflection error" - yet another striking way that we misunderstand mirrors.

Imagine you're at the entrance to a narrow corridor and further down, several feet away, hanging on the right-hand wall, there are three rectangular mirrors (30cm x 45cm) at head height. At what point, as you proceed down the corridor, do you think you'll be able to see your face in the mirrors?

The correct answer is that your face will only be visible in each mirror when you are passing directly opposite. At no point will your face be visible in more than one mirror.

Lawson first tested people's understanding of this idea by having them stand at one end of a corridor and say in which of four positions in the corridor a mannequin "Janine" (moved about on a trolley) would be able to see herself in each of the three mirrors. Only two of the four positions in question were actually directly opposite one of the mirrors. So, of the 12 possible position/mirror combinations, the answer "yes, Janine can see her face" should only have been given twice. In fact, the 18 Liverpool University students answered yes an average of 6.1 times, grossly overestimating how often the mannequin could see herself in the mirrors. The errors weren't randomly distributed, they tended to be made when the mannequin was located near to the mirrors, but not directly opposite them.

The same errors were made when a single, larger mirror was divided up into three using duct tape (to ensure that participants realised the mirror surfaces were all flat against the wall and not angled like a dressing-table mirror), and also when the original three mirrors were arranged on the wall vertically, rather than horizontally.

Perhaps, Lawson reasoned, the participants were performing so poorly because it was confusing assuming the perspective of a mannequin. And also, perhaps because they were asked about each position and each mirror one at a time, so that they didn't realise the full implications of what they were saying: that the mannequin could see her face in multiple mirrors from a single position, and in the same mirror from different positions (an optical impossibility in the situation as described).

To avoid these issues, Lawson created another set-up in which more participants (prospective students and their parents) were shown a photograph of a person sat facing five mirrors arranged on the wall in the shape of a cross, with the central mirror at head height. The participants were given a piece of paper with five rectangles on it arranged in a cross shape, and they had to draw crudely what the person in the photo would be able to see of themselves in each mirror. Once again, there was a striking overestimation of where the person would be able to see reflections of their own head and face (participants should have indicated that the person's head/face would only be visible to them in the central mirror).

Finally, more participants actually sat in front of this set up of five mirrors in a cross shape. Half of them had just the central mirror uncovered then re-covered before they used the pencil and paper to indicate what they'd see in all the mirrors (the remaining mirrors were covered throughout). The other half of the participants had all the mirrors uncovered first, then re-covered before they gave their answers with the paper and pencil. In the first case, 58 per cent of the participants made multiple reflection errors - again, overestimating where they'd be able to see themselves in the mirrors. In the latter case, with the chance to experience the entire mirror set up, 24 per cent made such errors.
"This multiple reflection error is particularly surprising," Lawson said "because it directly contradicts our everyday experience that mirrors reflect a single coherent scene."

So why do people misunderstand mirrors in this way? Lawson said there are probably multiple reasons. One participant described her naive belief that whenever you turn your eyes towards a mirror, wherever it is, you will see yourself reflected in it - "mirrors look back at you," she said. No doubt this belief was held implicitly by many of the other participants.

"Almost nobody will have a clear, thought-through and self-consistent theory of optics which they use to guide their predictions," Lawson said. "Most people probably use a set of underspecified beliefs and heuristics, some of which are incompatible, leading them to make unsophisticated, noisy and inaccurate predictions. People rarely think explicitly about optics and what determines what they can see in a mirror or a window - or indeed, what they can see directly."
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Lawson, R. (2012). Mirrors, mirrors on the wall…the ubiquitous multiple reflection error. Cognition, 122 (1), 1-11 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.001

Further reading:
Link to Mirrors and the mind (Psychologist magazine article).
Link to New York Times article on the psychology of mirrors.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest. Thanks to Rebecca Lawson for providing images of her experiment.

Did I do that? The psychology of alcohol-induced blackouts

The morning after. Photo credit: Sophie Scott

When our autobiographical memory lets us down, how do we reconstruct the lost chapters? Two psychologists Robert Nash and Melanie Takarangi have identified the perfect population for investigating this very question. "Colleges and universities teem with amnesiacs of a sort," they write, referring to the large number of students who drink quantities of alcohol sufficient to wash away whole episodes from memory.

Nash and Takarangi surveyed 280 students about their alcohol-induced blackouts and found the students were highly motivated to reconstruct what happened. In fact, their desire to fill in the blanks often led them to rely on unreliable sources, such as drunk friends, and to therefore form false memories of the blacked-out period. "Such errors could have enormous impact," the researchers said, "not least because during blackouts people engage in ... risky behaviours such as drug use, fighting and sexual intercourse."

Of the surveyed students, 85 per cent described themselves as drinkers and 61 per cent reported having experienced a total or partial memory blackout whilst drunk. Men were more likely to have had a blackout than women (75.4 vs. 56.7 per cent).

The researchers presented the students with a hypothetical party scenario in which they'd experienced a blackout and asked them to say how motivated they'd be to try each of eight strategies for filling in the blanks. Unsurprisingly, the students tended to say they were motivated most strongly to seek the help of a sober friend who'd been there. Other favoured strategies included: checking photos or videos, consulting a drunk friend who'd been present, and thinking hard about what had happened. Less favoured were: returning to the scene of the party, asking a sober or drunk party guest other than a friend.

Comparing students who'd experienced blackouts in real life with those who hadn't, an intriguing difference emerged - the blackout sufferers were more motivated to rely on drunk friends and there was a slight trend for them to judge drunk friends as more reliable. Blackout sufferers also judged drunk non-friends as more reliable than did non-sufferers.

Turning to the students' reports of how they'd actually attempted to reconstruct boozy blanks in real life, consulting a drunk friend was more common than consulting sober people (77 per cent vs. 69.6 per cent). Forty-three per cent said they'd seen a photo or video of what had happened on at least one occasion; 20.9 per cent had found other physical evidence.

The blackout sufferers said that their reconstructions of boozy blanks sometimes turned out later to have been inaccurate - 16.9 per cent admitted to this having happened, and they said the most frequent reason was relying on drunk friends. Some of the students (11.5 per cent of blackout sufferers) said they'd previously had confidence in the incorrect account of what had happened; 3.4 per cent said they'd actually formed (false) memories for events that hadn't happened.

A curious paradox to emerge in the results was that students who said they'd relied on drunk friends in the past were more likely to admit having been exposed to misinformation, but at the same time were more confident in the future reliability of drunk friends and non-friends. The researchers speculated that perhaps drunk friends had been the only source of information in the past and "because people are highly motivated to reconstruct forgotten experiences, it is possible that such circumstances might encourage individuals to believe that the available sources of evidence are more reliable" - a kind of self-serving bias.

Finally, Nash and Takarangi asked the students if they'd ever knowingly given blackout sufferers false information about blanks in their memories. Seventy-six per cent of the sample said they might have unintentionally done so; 13.7 per cent said they'd deliberately made up details; 7.1 per cent had fabricated an entire event.

The researchers end their study on a sombre note. "We can only speculate about the consequences that blackout sufferers' false beliefs and memories could have in some cases," they said. "For instance, archival studies suggest that numerous innocent people have confessed to crimes after being led to believe they committed acts while drunk, and flawed reconstructions might also lead blackout sufferers to make false accusations against others."
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Nash, R., and Takarangi, M. (2011). Reconstructing alcohol-induced memory blackouts. Memory, 19 (6), 566-573 DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2011.590508

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

"Change deafness" - the scant attention we pay to the voice on the end of the phone

Our perception of the world is so restricted by the brain's finite attentional resources that large changes to the visual scene can occur without us noticing. Psychologists have studied this extensively and they call it "change blindness". But what about our limited vigilance to the world of sound? In a new study, Kimberly Fenn and her team have tested whether people notice when, mid phone-conversation, the person they're talking to changes. They found that unless there was a change of gender, most people didn't notice they were talking to someone else - a phenomenon the researchers call "change deafness".

Across five experiments, Fenn's team followed a similar procedure. Participants were interviewed on the telephone, ostensibly as part of a study into memories of smells. A young female interviewer greeted them, explained that there'd be twelve questions, then proceeded to fire away. After the third question, a different interviewer, usually another female, took over the questioning without warning or announcement (the four women who played the role of interviewer across the different experiments had voice frequencies of 200Hz, 202Hz, 218Hz, and 239Hz). After the twelfth question, participants were told the phone would be passed to a "supervisor". The supervisor took the phone, introduced herself, and asked progressively more specific questions to find out if participants had noticed the earlier voice change, ranging from "Did anything unusual happen during the interview?" to, "Did the experimenter's voice change at all during the interview?"

In the first two experiments, just 1 person out of 16 (6 per cent) and 1 out of 24 (4 per cent), respectively, noticed the voice change, even after they were asked about this directly. Moreover, none of the participants made any mention during the interview when the voice of the interviewer changed.

After the initial interview, but before the supervisor questions about a voice change, the participants were played recordings of the two interviewer voices and asked by the supervisor to say which was the voice of the interviewer (remember, at this point nearly all of them thought there was just one interviewer). Participants picked out the first interviewer voice just as often as the second voice - so it's not that one was particularly more memorable or dominant. However, presented with either one of the interviewer voices and a strange, unfamiliar voice, most participants (74 per cent) correctly picked out the interviewer voice. This means that in spite of the "change deafness" some aspects of the interviewer voices must have been encoded.

In another experiment, participants were warned in advance that the voice of the interviewer might change at some point during the interview. In this case, 75 per cent correctly reported afterwards that the voice of the interviewer had changed, and six of these nine participants knew the precise moment that the switch occurred. This suggests "change deafness" doesn't occur because we're incapable of detecting a change, but because in usual circumstances we don't bother paying enough attention to voices to detect such a change. This makes strategic sense, leaving more processing resources available for focusing on what's actually being said, rather than who's saying it.

"If language use evolved in service of face-to-face conversation ... There is no reason for language processing to develop an alarm mechanism that would continuously monitor the talker's identity and automatically signal a talker change," the researchers said. "Given the assumption of interlocutor stability, listeners are free to focus attention on the linguistic message."

"Change deafness" has its limits. In yet another experiment, the interviewer voice changed without warning from a woman's to a man's, and in this case eleven out of twelve participants noticed the change. "When talkers differ in vocal tract sufficiently, such as when talkers differ in gender, these bottom-up acoustic differences may grab attention even in the absence of top-down expectations," the researchers said.
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Fenn, K., Shintel, H., Atkins, A., Skipper, J., Bond, V., & Nusbaum, H. (2011). When less is heard than meets the ear: Change deafness in a telephone conversation. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64 (7), 1442-1456 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.570353

Previously on the Digest: Phonagnosia - the inability to recognise people by their voice alone.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How listening to an iPod shrinks your sense of personal space

There you stand on the daily commute, so close to the man in front that you can count each strand of his chin stubble. Behind you, the breath of another traveller gently warms your neck. For a species that likes its space, it's amazing how we cope with the claustrophobia of city life.

Anecdotally, one way we manage is by plugging ourselves into an iPod, creating an invisible, audio-fuelled layer of protection. Now Ana Tajadura-Jiménez and her team have tested this idea scientifically. They asked dozens of participants to walk towards an unfamiliar experimenter (a man or woman) until they got so close it felt uncomfortable. In another condition, the experimenter walked towards the participant, and again the participant indicated when it felt too close. Crucially, this procedure was followed in silence, listening to positive music or listening to negative music. The unfamiliar musical clips, composed for an earlier experiment, were in the style of instrumental movie music. Sometimes the music was played over headphones via an iPod, other times it was played over a speaker system in the room. After the experiment, the participants listened to the music clips again and rated how much they affected them emotionally.

Positive music played over headphones (but not speakers) had the effect of shrinking the participants' sense of personal space, so that the approaching experimenter could walk closer to them before they (the participant) felt uncomfortable. On the other hand, negative music played over speakers (but not headphones) expanded the participants' personal space, so they felt uncomfortable when the approaching experimenter was further away. These effects were most pronounced in the participants who afterwards reported that they'd been affected emotionally by the music to a greater degree. Music made no difference to the participants' sense of personal space when they were the ones walking towards the experimenter.

A possible weakness of the study is that the experimenters could hear the music that the participants were listening to, which may have had a subtle influence on their behaviour. The Digest put this to Dr Tajadura-Jiménez. She told us this was unlikely, since the experimenters were careful to maintain the same neutral expression throughout, and another researcher looked on to ensure consistency across conditions.

"Our study might help to understand the benefit that people find in using personal music players in crowded situations, such as when using the public transport in urban settings," the researchers concluded. "In situations in which there are little possibilities for personal mobility and personal space is constantly compromised, a portable device allowing for a change in the perceived space around would be highly desirable."

The findings chime with an earlier qualitative study in which a homeless man described how he used a personal radio to create his own sense of personal space - an "audio cave" - when out on the streets. The idea that music influences sense of personal space via its emotional effects also tallies with a recent study involving a brain-damaged patient. The woman S.M. had suffered damage to both her amygdala - deep brain nuclei involved in emotional processing - and appeared to have lost her sense of personal space as a result.
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Tajadura-Jiménez, A., Pantelidou, G., Rebacz, P., Västfjäll, D., and Tsakiris, M. (2011). I-Space: The Effects of Emotional Valence and Source of Music on Interpersonal Distance. PLoS ONE, 6 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026083

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

People don't follow their own directions when walking from A to B

Walk with me while I tell you about a new study into the psychology of finding our way. The research has uncovered at least three mental strategies. When asked to plan ahead and describe the most efficient route between two locations, we apparently visualise connections between highly salient streets, which leads us to formulate a relatively longer route, with fewer turns. This is known as graph-based way-finding. But asked to actually walk between the same two points, we base our route more on direction, make more turns, take smaller streets, and navigate more efficiently, as ongoing feedback from the unfolding scene reminds us of short-cuts. This incremental approach is known as direction-based wayfinding. The third mental strategy is brought to bear when we give directions to a stranger, with reference made to the simplest possible route, with the fewest turns and passing the most salient landmarks.

Christoph Hölscher at the University of Freiburg and his colleagues said this is the first time that anyone has shown "how different planning and navigation conditions lead to different wayfinding strategies". They asked dozens of participants to plan, describe and walk routes through Freiburg. All those involved were highly familiar with the city. Asked to describe the shortest possible route between two city locations, and then asked to walk the shortest possible route between those same two points, not a single participant followed the path they'd actually described.

"It is noteworthy that none of the participants adhered to the route they had described only minutes ago," the researchers said. "They discarded their previously made plan directly after getting perceptual feedback about spatial properties, and showed little sign of trying to pursue an action sequence that they had previously identified as their own best solution."

The new results undermine earlier claims that routes are generally planned entirely in advance. "In addition," the researchers said, "the results highlight the importance of sensory (visual) feedback from the environment for route planning."
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Hölscher, C., Tenbrink, T., and Wiener, J. (2011). Would you follow your own route description? Cognitive strategies in urban route planning. Cognition, 121 (2), 228-247 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.005

Further reading:

• How to give directions
• How skilled are London taxi drivers at learning routes through unfamiliar towns?
• We really do walk in circles when we're lost.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Would you look where Berlusconi is looking?

"You should see what I'm looking at!"

Our attention is pulled in the direction of where we see other people looking. It happens so automatically that experts have assumed it's a reflex response, impervious to conscious factors, such as the particular identity of the gazer whose line of sight we're following. But a recent monkey study challenged this interpretation: high-status macaques were observed following the gaze of other high-status, but not low-status, monkeys. Inspired by this result, a team of Italian psychologists have examined whether our attention is influenced more by the gaze of politicians whose political persuasion matches our own.

Marco Tullio Liuzza and his colleagues recorded the eye movements of 28 participants sat at a computer screen. Approximately half were right-wing and half were left-wing. The task was to make a fast leftward saccade if a central square turned blue, or a fast rightward saccade if it turned orange. The interesting twist was that this central square was located in the middle of the eyes of a politician, who was shown staring straight ahead. Just before the central square changed colour, the politician's eyes shifted direction either in the same direction indicated by the square (potentially facilitating the participants' own eye movement) or in the opposite direction. The faces that were used belonged to Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing Italian Prime Minister; Bruno Vespa (right-wing commentator); Antonio Di Pietro (current left-wing leader); and Romano Prodi (former left-wing Prime Minister).

The gaze shift by the political faces made no difference to the speed of the participants' own eye movements, but did affect their accuracy. For right-wing participants, their accuracy was influenced far more by the gaze shifts of Berlusconi and Vespa (the right-wingers) than by Pietro or Prodi. The influence of Berlusconi's and Vespa's eyes was similar in magnitude. By contrast, the left-wing participants were not influenced by the gaze direction of the political faces, left-wing or right-wing. Another detail was that Berlusconi's gaze direction had a stronger influence on those participants who considered their own personality to be similar to his.

A potential confound is that Berlusconi wasn't just a right-wing character, he was also Prime Minister at the time of the study, and his party was the leading party. His influence (and perhaps Vespa's, by association) on right-wing participants might therefore have been related to his position of authority, not just his political leanings. Certainly past research has shown that conservatives are more sensitive to authority than liberals.

Specifically on the reason why left-wingers weren't influenced by Berlusconi's gaze - Liuzza and his team said this was consistent with "studies showing that Italian left-wing voters detest the right-wing leader."

The researchers concluded that their study shows how: "... a sophisticated blend of situational and dispositional factors underlies the capture of reflexive gaze-following exerted on voters by the gaze of politicians. Future studies on the plasticity of this effect may provide new insights in the fundamental aspect of the human tendency to coalesce in large groups and complex societies."
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Liuzza, M., Cazzato, V., Vecchione, M., Crostella, F., Caprara, G., and Aglioti, S. (2011). Follow My Eyes: The Gaze of Politicians Reflexively Captures the Gaze of Ingroup Voters. PLoS ONE, 6 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025117

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Are we really blind to Internet banners?

Is this ad a waste of time?

It's a line of research that Google doesn't want you to know about. Many studies suggest people have a habit of simply ignoring web banners on Internet sites - a phenomenon known as banner blindness. The evidence for this ad avoidance is based largely on tests of people's explicit memory of ads after they've browsed a site. Of course that doesn't mean that the participants hadn't looked at the ads, nor does it mean that the ads hadn't lodged their message subconsciously.

Now Guillaume Hervet and his team have attempted to address these points in an eye-tracking study. Thirty-two participants read eight web-pages about choosing a digital camera. On the third, fourth, seventh and eighth pages, a Google-style rectangular text ad (180 x 150 pixels) was embedded in the right-hand side of the editorial content. The second ad was different from the first, and then the same two ads appeared on the seventh and eighth pages, respectively. Also, half the participants were exposed to ads that were congruent with the camera topic of the web-pages; the other half to incongruent ads. All advertised brands were fictitious.

The results may be of some consolation to Google and their advertisers. Eighty-two per cent of the participants did actually look at one or more of the ads. Or put another way: of the 128 ad exposures, 37 per cent were looked at once or more. Had the ad content made a lasting impression? To test this, after the browsing phase, the participants attempted to read the same ads presented in varying degrees of blurry degradation. Their performance was compared to a new group of control participants who hadn't done the earlier web browsing. If performance was superior among the participants who'd earlier been exposed to the ads, this would suggest they had a lasting memory of the ad content. In fact, performance was only superior for web-browsing participants who'd earlier been exposed to ads in a congruent context.

Another aspect to the results is how the participants' behaviour changed over the course of the web browsing. The first and third ads were looked at for longer than the second and fourth ads. This is probably because the second and fourth ads appeared on pages that had been preceded by a page with an ad on it in the same location - the participants seemed to have learned to ignore that area of the page. On the other hand, it seems a couple of pages without ads was enough to restore ad-looking behaviour.

The lessons for web advertisers are clear: don't advertise on every page, vary ad location, and make sure the ad topic is congruent with the web-site content.
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Hervet, G., Guérard, K., Tremblay, S., & Chtourou, M. (2011). Is banner blindness genuine? Eye tracking internet text advertising. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (5), 708-716 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1742

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Steve Jobs' gift to cognitive science

The ubiquity of iPhones, iPads and other miniature computers promises to revolutionise research in cognitive science, helping to overcome the discipline's over-dependence on testing Western, educated participants in lab settings.

That's according to an international team of psychologists who say the devices allow for experimentation on an unprecedented scale. "The use of smartphones allows us to dramatically increase the amount of data collected without sacrificing precision," say Stephane Dufau and his colleagues, "and thus has the potential to uncover laws of mind that have previously been hidden in the noise of small-scale experiments." In contrast, they argue that conducting cognitive psychology experiments over the internet has not been a great success because of problems obtaining the necessary precision of timing.

To illustrate their point, the researchers developed an iPhone/iPad App that replicates the classic "lexical decision task" used by psychologists to study the sub-second mental processes involved in reading. Participants are presented with a series of letter strings and simply have to indicate as quickly as possible whether each one is a real word or not. The App was launched as a seven-language international effort in December 2010 and after just four months data had been collected from over four thousand participants. By way of comparison, it took more than three years to collect a similar amount of data via conventional means. It will be easy to add further languages to the App, including non-Romanic alphabet languages like Chinese.

The free Science XL App presents the task to users as a test of word power and offers a choice of task lengths from two to six minutes. Once enrolled, participants use Yes/No buttons on the touch-screen display to indicate whether the letter strings that appear are real words or not. Each participant's performance stats are presented at the end and they are given the option of forwarding their results to the researchers via email. Extreme negative outliers were excluded from further analysis. There is the obvious issue of participants choosing to only send in favourable performance data. However, this doesn't spoil the ability to examine the effect of different factors on performance. For example, the data collected via the App matched many known features of lexical decision time data: reaction times were quicker for more common words and mean reaction times correlated with data collected in psychology labs.

Using smartphones "has wide multidisciplinary applications in areas as diverse as economics, social and affective neuroscience, linguistics, and experimental philosophy," say Dufau and his collaborators. "Finally it becomes possible to reliably collect culturally diverse data on a vast scale, permitting direct tests of the universality of cognitive theories."

This isn't the first time that psychology researchers have aired their excitement about the potential of mobile technologies to revolutionise their methods. A 2009 study used mobile phones to monitor participants' social movements and phone calls.
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Dufau, S., Duñabeitia, J., Moret-Tatay, C., McGonigal, A., Peeters, D., Alario, F., Balota, D., Brysbaert, M., Carreiras, M., Ferrand, L., Ktori, M., Perea, M., Rastle, K., Sasburg, O., Yap, M., Ziegler, J., and Grainger, J. (2011). Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science. PLoS ONE, 6 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024974

-Thanks to Marc Brysbaert for the tip-off.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

For Christians, Dawkins and the Qur'an leave a bad taste in the mouth, literally

Many studies have shown that moral disgust is "embodied". Contemplation of taboo deeds really does leave people physically sickened. Now Ryan Ritter and Jesse Preston have extended this literature to show that religious beliefs that contradict one's own also leave a bad taste in the mouth, literally.

The genius in this study is the cover story. Eighty-two Christian student participants were told they were taking part in two separate investigations: one a marketing survey requiring that they taste two different drinks; the other a study of handwriting and personality. The participants first tasted a lemon-based drink and rated it. Then, ostensibly to allow their palates to refresh, they completed the handwriting task, which involved them copying out either a neutral text (an intro to a dictionary); a section from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (in which he describes the God of the Old Testament as "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction"); or a section from the Qur'an (from Surah 47: 1-2). A personality questionnaire helped embellish the cover story. Finally, the students tested the second drink and rated it. A handful of participants guessed the true purpose of the study and were excluded from the analysis.

In reality the two drinks were identical and the key measure was how the participants responded to the drink after exposure to religious beliefs that contradicted their own. The findings were clear: the Christian participants reported finding the drink far more disgusting after they'd written out a passage from either Richard Dawkins or from the Qur'an. In contrast, their ratings of the drink were unchanged after writing out the neutral passage.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time some of the participants had a chance to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe after writing out a passage from the Qur'an, from Dawkins, or from the Bible. Once again, exposure to Dawkins or the Qur'an (but not the Bible) heightened participants' disgust reaction to the drink, unless, that is, they had a chance to clean their hands.

Other ratings of the drink, such as bitterness or sourness, were unaffected so this was a specific effect on disgust. Also, general negative affect was unable to explain the results.

"The present research provides evidence that contact with rejected beliefs elicits disgust," the researchers said. "Whereas the majority of past work on moral purity has focused on disgust in response to morally questionable objects and actions, these data suggest that contact with outgroup religious beliefs may be an equally threatening source of impurity, and can literally leave a bad taste in the mouth."

Future research is needed to see if it's necessary for people to write or say rejected religious beliefs in order to experience disgust (perhaps by provoking the feeling that they've violated their own sanctity) or if instead mere contemplation of the material suffices. Ritter and Preston also plan to test the reactions of people from other religious groups and the effect of rejected non-religious beliefs - in all cases they predict morally rejected beliefs will elicit physical disgust.
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RS Ritter and JL Preston (2011). Gross gods and icky atheism: disgust responses to rejected religious beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 DOI: 10.1016.j.jesp.2011.05.006

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Brain training for babies actually works (short term, at least)

Products designed to give babies and young children an educational headstart are hugely popular but they're mostly backed up by weak science. In some cases, for example with educational DVDs, there's even evidence of potential harm to language development, albeit that this evidence has been challenged by the creators of the DVDs.

Meanwhile, research with adults suggests that so-called brain training exercises (puzzles and memory and attention tasks on a computer) rarely lead to general intellectual benefits. Instead people just get better on the specific training tasks they complete.

Given this background, the prospects for brain training for babies look decidedly shaky. And yet in a new study, a team led by Sam Wass has shown brain training exercises for babies (focused on attention) led to widespread cognitive benefits over a two-week period. "To our knowledge, this is the first report of distal transfer of training effects following cognitive training in participants younger than 4 years old," they write.

Wass and his colleagues invited 42 healthy, 11-month-old babies to their lab five times over two weeks. Whilst there, half the babies undertook an average of 77 mins of training in screen-based tasks that varied in difficulty according to each baby's performance. The other babies spent the same time watching TV clips and animations.

The four attentional training tasks all required the babies to use their direction of gaze to create various effects. For example, in the butterfly task, so long as the baby fixated on it, a butterfly "flew" across the screen as distractors (e.g. house) scrolled in the other direction. As soon as the baby stopped fixating the butterfly, the distractors disappeared and the butterfly remained stationary. In another "elephant" task, the babies were rewarded with animations when they succeeded in fixating an elephant rather than a similarly sized distractor.

Compared with the control group, the babies who undertook the training showed improvements in basic lab measures of cognitive performance, completed at the beginning and end of the two-week training period, including: task-switching ability (a sign of cognitive control), in sustained attention, faster eye movement reaction times and quicker attention disengagement. The effect sizes ranged from .54 up to 1.06 (generally considered medium to large). The researchers argued this was unlikely to be simply due to greater motivation in the trained babies - for example, the improvements to sustained attention were larger towards "interesting stimuli", indicating a selectivity in the effects. The researchers were surprised that there were no working memory benefits, but said this could be because working memory "is weak at this early age".

In free play in front of a puppet theatre, somewhat paradoxically (given their increased ability at sustained attention), the trained babies showed a trend toward more, shorter glances. The researchers reasoned this could be because the training had given the babies' greater flexible control of their attention, depending on context. This is an important result because past research has linked this gaze style at 9 months with superior language development at 31 months. In general, Wass and his team said attentional control could be a "tool for learning" that aids the later acquisition of other skills.

" ... It is striking that we found changes following briefer training periods than those used by other studies [with older children]," the researchers said. " ... Further work is required to assess whether this is because infant brains are more plastic and more readily amenable to training or because eye-gaze contingent training is more immersive in comparison with the point-and-click computer interface [using a mouse] used by other groups."

Wass and his colleagues conceded that more research was needed to assess whether the observed training effects would last into the medium and long term. A possibility is that training effects in babies are incredibly fast, but also quick to dissipate. Regardless, for the time being, this is a study that's bound to excite competitive parents and educational entrepreneurs alike.
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Wass, S., Porayska-Pomsta, K., and Johnson, M. (2011). Training Attentional Control in Infancy. Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.004

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How psychology helped locate HMAS Sydney II, lost for over 60 years

The next time an ignoramus asks you what psychology has ever achieved, here's a new answer for you: it only helped in the 2008 discovery of the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney II, lost in deep water off the west coast of Australia since its sinking in November 1941.

John Dunn and Kim Kirsner have documented in a new paper how they used insights from research into memory transmission to analyse the testimony from the German survivors of the ship, HSK Kormoran, that battled with Sydney not long before both vessels were lost. Whereas, tragically, all the crew of Sydney perished, 317 of the German crew survived and many were interrogated by Australian authorities about what happened. Finding Kormoran was the key that would unlock the location of Sydney, as the ships were proximate at the time of their sinking.

Dunn and Kirsner applied many principles from cognitive psychology to the testimony provided by the German survivors, which included 72 references to the last known location of Kormoran, many of them contradictory. One of these principles is that as memory becomes degraded, either over time in an individual, or through transmission from one person to another - it becomes progressively influenced by a person's top-down expectations and expertise. Consider a study in which participants were asked to recall pictures of fruit and veg, some portrayed larger, some smaller, than their real-life sizes. People's memories for the pictures were distorted in the direction of prior knowledge, so that large vegetables were recalled as having been portrayed as larger.

Based on this idea, and with reference to the status and opportunity of the various witnesses, Dunn and Kirsner identified seven "source statements" about the location of Kormoran which had informed the testimony of the other witnesses and been (further) distorted by them. For example, one of the statements, now known to be inaccurate, was from the Kormoran captain Theodor Detmers.

To confirm this assessment of the available data, the researchers exploited techniques used in the analysis of species evolution, to identify clusters of statements, with each cluster containing statements of various levels of degradation or "mutation" from the key source statements. Once the source statements were confirmed, the researchers tested candidate locations for Kormoran and worked out the potential of each one in relation to its distance from the seven source statements.

A key facet of Dunn and Kirsner's approach was to use all the available testimony to arrive at a prediction of where Kormoran would be found. By contrast, other non-psychological experts involved in the search had tended to rely on just one or two key witnesses, such as Detmers.

By combining the best fit approach from the seven source statements with two further physical landmarks - drift objects lost from Kormoran and an emergency signal sent by Kormoran just prior to battle - Dunn and Kirsner identified a recommended search area. On 16 March 2008, the Finding Sydney Foundation located Kormoran just 5km from Dunn and Kirsner's best prediction of where she lay. Five days later, Sydney was found 21km away. The discovery helped heal a scar in Australia's history.

"The method we developed in response to the problem that was placed before us was necessarily tailored to the specific details of that problem," the researchers said. "Nevertheless, it may provide a blueprint for potential solutions to other similar problems. Such problems may include, but would not necessarily be restricted to, search problems for missing objects. In our view, the critical feature of a problem that would make it suitable for our methodology would be a set of statements or similar data that can be regarded as a set of constraints on a state of affairs that can be evaluated quantitatively. For example, and to move away from the present spatial domain, a relevant problem may involve the evaluation of eyewitness descriptions of a particular person, e.g. a criminal."
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Dunn, J., and Kirsner, K. (2011). The search for HMAS Sydney II: Analysis and integration of survivor reports. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (4), 513-527 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1735

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Why you should go for a brisk walk before revising

The exam season may be over, but here's a simple piece of advice for next semester. Go for a brisk walk before studying and your memory of the material is likely to benefit.

Carlos Salas and his colleagues had dozens of students study 30 nouns, each displayed for 6 seconds. Some of the students went for a ten-minute walk before being presented with the words. They were told to adopt "the walking speed one would use when late to an appointment, but without the anxiety caused by such a scenario". Other students spent the same time sitting quietly looking at pictures of natural landscapes. After the study phase, some of the students went for another ten-minute walk before attempting to recall as many of the words as they could; other students sat quietly for ten minutes before their recall attempt. This meant there were four experimental groups (walk-walk, walk-sit, sit-sit, and sit-walk, depending on how the participants behaved before the study and recall phases).

The key finding is that those students who went for a walk before the study period recalled 25 per cent more words correctly compared with students who sat still before the study period. By contrast, walking versus sitting before the attempt at recall made no difference to the students' performance.

Past research has shown context-dependent effects on memory. For example, if you chew gum while learning, your recall performance will benefit if you also chew gum when attempting to retrieve memories. No evidence for this was found in this study in the sense that the students' performance was no better when their pre-recall activity (walk vs. sit) matched their pre-learning activity, perhaps because the recall test followed too soon after the learning phase, so that the effects of the earlier walk or sitting period were still ongoing.

Another detail of this study is that the researchers asked the students to report their levels of arousal and tension after the periods of sitting or walking. Arousal was higher after walking than sitting, but tension was no different. So increased arousal is a possible physiological mechanism underlying the benefits of a pre-study walk (see earlier Digest item: "Memory performance boosted while walking").

Salas and his team also looked at meta-memory: this is people's insight into their own memory processes. During the study phase, after each word appeared, the participants were asked to indicate their likelihood of recalling it correctly. Students who sat for ten minutes before studying tended to significantly overestimate their later performance. By contrast, the walkers were much more accurate. However, there was no absolute difference in the predictions made by the two groups. In other words, it seems the walkers only had superior meta-memory because walking boosted their performance to match their confidence.

"Overall, these results suggest that individuals can gain a memory advantage from a ten-minute walk before studying," the researchers said. "Given [these] positive results ... and [their] potentially important practical applications, we hope that researchers will continue to explore the relationship between walking, memory, and meta-memory."
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Salas, C., Minakata, K., and Kelemen, W. (2011). Walking before study enhances free recall but not judgement-of-learning magnitude. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23 (4), 507-513 DOI: 10.1080/20445911.2011.532207

If you liked this post, you might also like our round-up of 9 evidence based study tips.

[This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.]

Feeling lonely? Have a bath

Wallowing in the bath, immersed in soothing warm water, the benefits are more than sensuous, they're social too. That's according to John Bargh and Idit Shalev, researchers at Yale University, whose new research shows that physical warmth can compensate for social isolation. Indeed, their study suggests that people subconsciously self-comfort against loneliness through the use of warm baths and showers.

Among 51 undergrads, those who reported being more lonely also tended to bath or shower more often, to do so for longer and with warmer water. Overall, 33.5 per cent of the variation in these measures was accounted for by loneliness. A similar result was found for a community sample of 16 women and 25 men. Perhaps lonely people simply have more time to take baths because they go out less, but the association with preferring warmer water is harder to explain away.

A second study confirmed the causal role that physical temperature can play in people's sense of social warmth. Students conducted what they thought was a product test of a small therapeutic pack, which was either warm or cold. Those who evaluated the cold pack, holding it in their palm, subsequently reported feeling more lonely than those who tested a warm version of the pack.

What about a direct test of the therapeutic benefit of physical warmth? Another study had students recall a time they'd felt socially excluded, then they went on to perform the same product test of a warm or cold pack used before. Recalling being excluded had the expected effect of making students desire friendly company and comforting activities like shopping. But this effect was eradicated if they'd product tested the warm pack. "...Warm physical experiences were found to significantly reduce the distress of social exclusion," the researchers said.

Our recognition of the link between physical and social warmth is reflected in our language - "a warm smile", "a cold shoulder" - and has been for centuries: Dante in the Inferno links the betrayal of trust with the punishment of being physically frozen. Yet Bargh and Shalev think this understanding remains largely unconscious. To test this they had participants rate the loneliness of a protagonist after reading one of two near-identical versions of a short story. Participants who read the version in which she took a bath and shower in the same day didn't perceive her to be any more lonely than those who read the version without the extra bathing.

These findings build on the broader literature on embodied cognition, which has shown the effects of physical states on our thoughts and behaviour, and vice versa (e.g. heavier books are considered more important; washing alleviates guilt). And they add to past research suggesting a specific link between physical and social/emotional warmth. One earlier study found that participants felt socially closer to a researcher when they were tested in a warm room. Other research has linked physical and social warmth to activity in the same brain region - the anterior insular.

But this new study is the first to suggest we subconsciously administer our own tonic of physical warmth to compensate for social rejection. And it's the first to provide causal evidence that physical warmth can ameliorate feelings of exclusion. Bargh and Shalev speculated their findings could even have practical applications ... "the physical-social warmth association may be a boon to the therapeutic treatment of syndromes that are mainly disorders of emotion regulation, such as Borderline Personality Disorder," they said.
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J Bargh, and I Shalev (2011). The substitutability of physical and social warmth in daily life. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0023527

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The neuroscience of batman, or how the human brain performs echolocation

Over the last few years it’s become apparent that humans, like bats, can make effective use of echolocation by emitting click sounds with the tongue and listening for the echoes that result. Now a team led by Lore Thaler at the University of Western Ontario has conducted the first ever investigation into the neural correlates of this skill.

Thaler and her colleagues first had to overcome the practical challenge of studying echolocation in the noisy environment of a brain scanner, in which participants are required to keep their heads still. The researchers established that two blind, experienced echo-locators, EB and LB, were able to interpret with high accuracy the recordings of tongue clicks and echoes they’d made earlier, and so this form of passive echolocation was studied in the scanner.

Among several remarkable new insights generated by the research, the most important is that EB and LB exhibited increased activity in their visual cortices, but not their auditory cortices, when they listened to clicks and echo recordings taken outside, compared with when they listened to the exact same recordings with the subtle echoes omitted. No such differential activity was detected among two age-matched, male sighted controls.

The finding suggests that it is the visual cortex of the blind participants that processes echoes, not their auditory cortex. This visual cortex activity was stronger in EB who was blind from an earlier age than LB, and is more experienced at echolocation. However the echolocation skill of both blind participants is remarkable. Both are able to cycle and they can identity objects, and detect movement. EB, but not LB, showed evidence of a contra-lateral pattern in his echo-processing brain activity, just as sighted people do with the processing of light. That is, activity was greater in the brain hemisphere opposite to the source of stimulation.

Just how the visual cortex extracts meaningful information from subtle echo sounds must await future research. The researchers best guess is that the relevant neurons perform ‘some sort of spatial computation that uses input from the processing of echolocation sounds that was carried out elsewhere, most likely in brain areas devoted to auditory processing.’ Establishing the functional role of the cerebellar processing that was also differentially activated by echo sounds in the echo-locators must also await future research.

‘… [O]ur data clearly show that EB and LB use echolocation in a way that seems uncannily similar to vision,’ the researchers concluded. ‘In this way, our study shows that echolocation can provide blind people with a high degree of independence and self-reliance in their daily life. This has broad practical implications in that echolocation is a trainable skill that can potentially offer powerful and liberating opportunities for blind and vision-impaired people.’

If this research has piqued your interest in echolocation, a previous research paper on the topic by Antonio Martinez and his co-workers explained that anyone, blind or sighted, is able to learn the skill. In fact they said that after two hours practice a day for two weeks you should be able to recognise blindfolded whether there is an object in front of you or not.
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L Thaler, S Arnott, and M Goodale (2011). Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts. PLOS One DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020162

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.