‘Long time no see’ is something I heard repeatedly in Britain even though it totally violates all the English grammar I learned at school. Clearly, Brits should correct this expression originating from Chinese Pidgin English rather than adopt it. The reason it entered common usage anyway is at the heart of why you might find English a lot easier to learn than the other British languages like Welsh or Gaelic. In a nutshell: when you learn English, it learns something from you as well.
Three years ago Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale published a (freely available) paper in which they looked at over 2,000 languages across the globe and quantified how difficult they are, e.g. by looking at their morphological complexity. Morphological complexity refers to how difficult it is to say a word in its correct form (‘went’ rather than ‘go-ed’). Its simpler counterpart is usually the use of more words to say the same thing (compare the sometimes irregular past like ‘gone’ with the always regular future ‘will go’). Using these principles Lupyan and Dale could show that languages which are spoken by more people tend to be simpler. Why?
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When languages grow big, they tend to get simple.
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Lupyan and Dale hypothesise that languages with more speakers also include more people who learned it when they were no longer children. As an adult, when you are not that good at learning a language anymore, you make yourself understood without speaking perfectly. Over time, these mistakes and simplifications are adopted by the language simply because difficult things never get learned by a new generation of learners. They are just forgotten. In some sense, the language learns what it can expect from its learners and what not. This drive towards simplification is a lot less strong when only expert language learners, i.e. children, are responsible for language transmission.
This year, a new study got published which directly looked at the proportion of adult second language learners in a given community rather than just assume it from the community size, as Lupyan and Dale did. Christian Bentz and Bodo Winter looked at case marking which is another pain to learn. In many languages around the world the Who does What to Whom pattern is not expressed through word order, like in English, but instead through case marking on words (similar to difference in roles marked by ‘he – him – his’). It turns out that on average languages which managed to retain a case system only have 16% of its speakers learn it after childhood, while the comparable number for no-case languages is 44%. Adults are bad at learning grammatical case systems, so it is forgotten if many adult learners speak the language.
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His forebearers shaped English. As does he.
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So, yes, some languages are indeed easier. Learning them is a lot simpler. The reason being that language is not an invention of a single person. Instead, it is a communication tool shaped by the people using it. When Chinese people started using English they made many mistakes, some of them got adopted like ‘Long time no see’. Notice how it uses very little morphology, i.e. the words are all like you would find them in a dictionary, and no case at all (by that time English no longer had a full case system).
Follow the path of other adult language learners and you will meet with less resistance.
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Bentz C, & Winter B (2013). Languages with more second language learners tend to lose case Language Dynamics and Change, in press
Lupyan G, & Dale R (2010). Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS one, 5 (1) PMID: 20098492
At 39km above planet earth, would you have made Felix Baumgartner’s step off the platform? It was very dangerous, no doubt. But is this the reason why you wouldn’t have? People engage in many dangerous things. And I am not talking about skydiving. I mean the ordinary, every day kind of danger. Surely, some dangers can hardly be avoided, say road traffic (which is the leading cause of death for people in my age group). For others there is no obvious non-dangerous equivalent. But what if there was an activity with no practical value, which could easily be carried out without danger, but which nonetheless millions of people worldwide engage in? Listening to too loud music is such an activity.
Is this an exaggeration? Surely, if loud music was really dangerous, people would avoid it. Make no mistake, the scientific consensus clearly lays out the danger. Round about half the people exposed to music professionally show some hearing loss. Researchers have found worrying hearing impairments in classical musicians, rock/pop musicians, and music bar tenders. And the danger is not limited to professionals. The majority of rock concert attendees experience temporary auditory problems such as tinnitus or being hard of hearing. You are actually a daredevil when you listen to too loud music.
But this behaviour is not limited to your typical daredevil characters à la Felix Baumgartner. People flock to very loud concerts. Even toddlers prefer fast and loud music over slow and quiet music. Perhaps the clearest example for loudness’s paradoxical appeal is the band Sun 0))). Their music is without discernible rhythm, harmony or melody. Pure loudness. And still, they are successful. Hear for yourself:
The Sun 0))) concert is a good example of the mysterious attraction of too loud music but it may also offer clues for understanding why people subject themselves to it. Actually, not just this band’s concerts are too loud. Most concerts are. And so are night clubs. This is not the place to go to for a quiet night out. This is where you want energy, fun and excitement. It turns out that this is exactly what loud music is associated with. An Australian research team led by Roger Dean showed that the perceived arousal of music – whether a classical piece or Sun 0))) like noise – followed its loudness profile. Sweet melody or not, when people go out they want energetic music. And this music happens to be loud.
Beyond going out – why listen to too loud music when sitting still?
However, such an explanation can only be part of the answer. We have all seen the person on the bus with his headphones in or were annoyed by the colleague on the next desk with his music choice permeating the office through his headphones. These people are not out dancing. They look pretty low energy, if anything. And still they put their hearing at risk.
Neil Todd and Frederick Cody from the University of Manchester may offer a solution to the puzzle. They found that loud tones not only activate our sense of hearing but also our sense of balance. This happens because the nice distinction between these two modalities does not work for a structure in the ear called the saccule. It responds to head movements as well as rather low sounds. Through this structure muscles automatically react, explaining why deaf people’s muscles can nonetheless react to loud clicks whereas vestibularly impaired people’s can’t. Todd and Cody found the saccule to start reacting around the so called ‘rock’n’roll’-threshold of 105 dB. Is it just a coincidence that the beat of club music is typically in the tonal range and at the loudness level of the saccule? Could it be that the enjoyment of too loud music works through the same mechanism as the pleasure derived from baby swings, roller coasters and head banging? If so, the fun of skydiving and too loud music listening may have more in common than generally thought.
Yellow: Hearing. Brown: Balance. The saccule is neither.
The greatest mystery surrounding too loud music, though, are not people seeking it in quiet environments such as the bus or the office. The strangest thing is the appeal of too loud environments even when one plugs the ears. It has become more and more common to go to rock concerts with ear plugs. The obvious question is why people don’t just refrain from going to rock concerts all together and wait until concert organisers realise that they overdid it with the decibel levels.
Seeking intimacy through loudness
The final piece of the puzzle could be an idea exemplified in research done by Russo and colleagues from Ryerson University. They found that ordinary people could successfully distinguish piano, cello and trombone tones which they never heard but instead only felt on their backs. Even deaf people were able to do this. This research suggests that, yet again, the involvement of a second modality explains too loud music seeking. Hearing and vision are often grouped together because they reveal distant information. Smell, taste and touch, on the other hand, are intimate sensations only available when directly interacting with an object or person. If someone sees or hears your fiancé(e) you may not mind. But imagine if someone tried to touch or even taste him/her? There is something intimate about touch and perhaps we seek this intimacy when trying to immerse ourselves in music. Incidentally, this is also what was advertised as the novelty of Felix Baumgartner’s jump. For the first time someone can say what it felt like to break the sound barrier. Previously, people only knew what it sounded and looked like. Somehow, this was not enough. We are curious about what he will report because we attach so much importance to the immediacy of touch. For ‘touching’ music, we need loud music as our skin is a poor substitute for the sensitive ears. Through the sense of touch music can cease to be felt at a distance and, instead, become a much more personal full body experience.
Has the mystery been solved? It seems as if modern psychology offers a range of explanations for why a perfectly avoidable but harmful activity is pursued by millions of people. Loud music offers a level of energy, fun and intimacy which soft music just can’t match. If you listen to too loud music, you have more in common with daredevils like Baumgartner than you thought.
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Dean, R.T., Bailes, F., & Schubert, E. (2011). Acoustic intensity causes perceived changes in arousal levels in music: an experimental investigation. PloS one, 6 (4) PMID: 21533095
Lamont, A. (2003). Toddlers’ musical preferences: musical preference and musical memory in the early years. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 518-9 PMID: 14681176
Russo, F.A., Ammirante, P., & Fels, D.I. (2012). Vibrotactile discrimination of musical timbre. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 38 (4), 822-6 PMID: 22708743
Todd, N.P. McAngus, & Cody, F.W. (2000). Vestibular responses to loud dance music: A physiological basis of the ‘rock and roll threshold’? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107 (1), 496-500 DOI: 10.1121/1.428317
Zhao, F., Manchaiah, VK., French, D., & Price, S.M. (2010). Music exposure and hearing disorders: an overview. International journal of audiology, 49 (1), 54-64 PMID: 20001447
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Images:
1) Photograph by: Felix Baumgartner, Twitter via the Vancouver Sun
2) The Vestibular System by Thomas Haslwanter via Wikimedia
Risk taking is somewhat enigmatic. On the one hand, risky choices in every day life – like drug abuse or drink driving – peak in adolescence. Never again in life is the threat to die from easily preventable causes as great. On the other hand, in laboratory experiments this risky choice peak in adolescence is absent. Instead, the readiness to take a gamble simply goes down the older you are. How can we explain this paradox? Perhaps, we should look at a tribe in the Amazon rain forest for answers.
A group of psychologists from Duke University led by David Paulsen looked at risk taking in the laboratory. Participants had the choice between either a guaranteed mediocre reward (say, four coins) or a gamble with a 50/50 chance of getting a low (e.g., two coins) or a high (e.g., six coins) reward. This is reminiscent of many choices we face in life: do you prefer ‘better safe than sorry’ or ‘high risk/high gain’? As you can see in their figure below, Paulsen and colleagues found adolescents to be greater risk seekers than adults. No matter how risky the gamble, adolescents choose it more often compared to adults.
‘Better save than sorry’ vs. ‘High risk – high gain’
Paradoxically, children are even more risk prone than adolescents. Moreover, the riskier the gamble the greater the difference to older people. Paulsen and colleagues have trouble explaining why risky choices in the laboratory do not show an adolescent peak which so many real world behaviours show. Could it have to do with laboratory risk being clearly defined while real world risk is unknown? Is it peer influencing which drives real world riskiness but is absent in the laboratory? Is there more thrill in real risk taking while lab experiments are so boring that thrill seeking doesn’t come into play?
Perhaps. However, one explanation – which I, personally, found totally obvious – is not even discussed. Risky choices decline with age, true. But the opportunity to make risky choices increases with age. In Western society there are both explicit laws as well as implicit norms that prevent children from the opportunity to take risks. Take as an example alcohol abuse. Many people perceive a party without alcohol as mediocre. With alcohol, however, you take a gamble between doing something very regrettable (read, low reward) or having the time of your life (read, high reward).
Where to test an alternative explanation: the real world.
How does this play out across the life span? It is inconceivable to serve beers at children’s birthday parties. However, the older you are the more you choose yourself what is served at your parties. When you are a young adolescent this increased risk taking opportunity meets a still high (but declining) risk taking readiness and you get wasted.
So, with age, risk taking goes down because the opportunities to take risks do not get more after a certain age while the readiness to take these risks still declines. The outcome would be a peak in real life risk taking at adolescence despite a linear decline in risky choices, i.e. exactly the observed pattern.
This interaction between risk taking opportunities and risk taking readiness is nicely illustrated by a native American tribe Dan Everett described in his very readable book Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes. The Pirahã do not have the Western notion of childhood. Everett writes that ‘children are just human beings in Pirahã society, as worthy of respect as any fully grown human adult. They are not seen as in need of coddling or special protections.’ (p.89). As a consequence, ‘there is no prohibition that applies to children that does not equally apply to adults and vice versa’ (p.97).
What does this mean for child alcohol consumption on the infrequent occasions when alcohol is available to the tribe? This episode gives the answer (p. 98):
Once a trader gave the tribe enough cachaça [alcohol] for everyone to get drunk. And that is what happened. Every man, woman and child in the village got falling-down wasted. Now, it doesn’t take much alcohol for Pirahãs to get drunk. But to see six-year-olds staggering with slurred speech was a novel experience for me.
So, perhaps this solves the paradox. The laboratory results were unrealistic by Western standards because they gave children a choice which they usually do not have: sure reward or gamble? Once you look at societies that do give children this choice you see that the laboratory results line up better with real life.
There is much to be learned by going beyond the laboratory and looking at the real world. The entire real world.
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Everett, D. (2008). Don’t sleep, there are snakes. London: Profile Books
Paulsen, D.J., Platt, M.L., Huettel, SA, & Brannon, E.M. (2012). From risk-seeking to risk-averse: the development of economic risk preference from childhood to adulthood. Frontiers in psychology, 3 PMID: 22973247
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images:
1) as found in Paulsen et al. (2012)
2) By Jorge.kike.medina (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons
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If you were not entirely indifferent to this post, please leave a comment.
Diana ten years before a certain false memory started spreading.
Do you remember August 31st, 15 years ago? Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in Paris along with her partner Dodi Fayed and others. Do you remember seeing the video of the crash? If so, you share that memory with 44% of the participants James Ost and colleagues recruited in 2002 in Britain.
This memory is false.
There is no such video. False memories are not a fringe problem, they are more widespread than one likes to think. Less than three months after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 in New York then US president George W. Bush claimed to have seen the first plane hit one of the Twin Towers. Afterwards, he claimed, he had entered a class room and had eventually been told about the second plane.
And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I use[d] to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’
George W. Bush as quoted in Greenberg, 2004, p. 363
TV channels are usually not very good in predicting terrorist attacks and September 11th was no exception. The first plane hitting the World Trade Center was not shown on live television. The person who was preparing for war as a response to the attacks apparently had a false memory of them.
Marvin Anderson was found guilty of rape due to a false memory. He spent 15 years in prison. Read his story: here.
If these examples are a chilling reminder of just how bad human memory is, consider that in 72% of wrongful convictions – which are later overturned by DNA evidence – eyewitness misidentification was a factor (Innocence Project). The unreliability of eye-witness memory is a widespread problem. New research coming out of Germany and Britain by Aileen Oeberst and Hartmut Blank (article in press) offers a way of overcoming false memories.
Their participants were shown a film of a car chase and heard a short summary of the action. The summary changed two small details but was otherwise correct. When asked in a subsequent questionnaire about the film these changed details were more likely to be misrembered than unchanged details which the summary of the film correctly represented. This finding is called the misinformation effect – a false memory is created through information received after a piece of information has been memorised. This is likely what happened to George W. Bush: the first plane hitting the World Trade Center was indeed shown on TV but only much later. A later viewing changed his memory of an earlier event.
After completing the questionnaire participants were told about the true purpose of the experiment, that details were changed between film and summary, and that they should fill in the questionnaire again. Now, the misinformation effect could no longer be found. Further experiments suggest that people no longer tried to remember a single detail (‘What happened to the car?’) but instead engaged in a more elaborate task of retrieving one or two memories from different sources (‘What happened to the car in the film rather than the summary?’).
Still, usually memories need to be retained for longer than 15 minutes. How do the findings change with a five week gap between implanting the false memory and trying to abolish it? The misinformation effect could still be reduced simply by telling people five weeks after getting film and summary that the two did not entirely match. Introducing a more elaborate questionnaire further improved memory. It leads to better performance because people are told in detail which manipulated details to consider carefully and it asks where they have a piece of information from.
The authors hesitantly suggest these changes to eye-witness testimony: 1) remind them that ‘they might have encountered additional information relevant to a witnessed event from various post-event sources (e.g. other witnesses, the media, etc.) and that some of this information may have been inconsistent with their own perceptions and memories.’ 2) ‘ask people not only for event details but also for (possibly contradictory) post-event information, and also […] explicitly ask for the source of every remembered detail.’ By making the remembering process more elaborate than a simple ‘Tell me what you know’ one can help people remember correctly.
The implications for what we mean by ‘memory’ are intriguing. Depending on what task you set people, they remember things differently. Apparently, constructing a memory from bits and pieces scattered in the mind is highly dependent on the situation we are in. The reason why we are not aware of this is because the brain plays a trick on us: a memory always feels somehow real, genuine, and personal. Even that of Diana’s crash video.
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Greenberg, D.L. (2004). President Bush’s False ‘Flashbulb’ Memory of 9/11/01 Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, 363-370 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1016
Oeberst, A., & Blank, H. (2012). Undoing suggestive influence on memory: The reversibility of the eyewitness misinformation effect Cognition DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.009
Ost, J., Vrij, A., Costall, A., & Bull, R. (2002). Crashing Memories and Reality Monitoring: Distinguishing between Perceptions, Imaginations and ‘False Memories’ Applied Cognitive Psychology, 16, 125-134 DOI: 10.1002/acp.779
Parents are often afraid of what happens once their children hit puberty and stop emulating their parents. Recent research suggests that this fear should start a lot earlier: in infancy. Of course, infants need their parents to learn but they need other infants when it comes to imitating things they already know.
Two recent articles by Zmyj from the Ruhr university in Bochum and colleagues present convincing evidence to back up infants’ occasional preference for peer imitation. First, when presented with videos of people playing with novel toys in familiar ways, fourteen month olds imitate a peer more than an older child aged 3.5 or an adult. Secondly, when presented with similar videos of people performing simple gestures (banging on the table, waving, clapping…) they again imitated a 14 month old more often than an older child or an adult.
These results are curious because at this age infants typically spend more time with their parents than with other infants. Furthermore, as far as imitation is used to learn new things the infants should prefer adults who are more knowledgeable. When it comes to novel actions the learning objective does actually prevail. Switching on a new lamp with the head or building a rattle is more likely to be copied from an adult model rather than an infant model (Seehagen & Herbert, 2011; Zmyj, Daum et al., 2012).
When it comes to infant-infant imitation, it may come out of a desire to belong to the same social group as the model, a sort of precursor to facebook’s Like button. Infant-adult imitation, on the other hand, may be more like a student-teacher relationship.
This set of studies powerfully shows that age matters to infants. They copy the behaviour of others depending on how old the model is and what sort of behaviour is shown. This sort of reasoning was long thought to be beyond 1 ½ year olds. Recent evidence, however, shows that infants play a more active part in choosing who to emulate than you may think.
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Seehagen, S.,, & Herbert, J.S. (2011). Infant Imitation From Televised Peer and Adult Models Infancy, 16 (2), 113-136 DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-7078.2010.00045.x
Zmyj, N., Aschersleben, G., Prinz, W., & Daum, M. (2012). The Peer Model Advantage in Infants’ Imitation of Familiar Gestures Performed by Differently Aged Models. Frontiers in psychology, 3 PMID: 22833732
Zmyj, N., Daum, M.M.,, Prinz, W.,, Nielsen, M.,, & Aschersleben, G. (2012). Fourteen-month-olds’ imitation of differently aged models Infant and Child Developement, 21 (3), 250-266 DOI: 10.1002/icd.750
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image: By Joshua Reynolds (jundurrahman.files.wordpress.com) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
World Health Organization reports about road safety are mind boggling: about 1.2 million people die on the world’s roads every year. For people of my age (15 to 29 year olds) it is the leading cause of death.
A rather recent addition to laws designed to reduce these numbers was the adoption of compulsory hands-free devices for mobile phones. Their safety value is easy to understand. When you look at a mobile phone display you cannot simultaneously look at the road. Similarly, using your hands for typing and using them for steering are at least partly incompatible actions.
How mobile phone use impairs sight and hands.
From a psychological point of view the current law tries to ensure that visual input channels (eyes) and motor output channels (hands) remain undisturbed. But what about the brain areas which control these channels?
This is the question recently investigated by Bergen from UC San Diego and colleagues. They put undergraduates in a driving simulator giving the impression of a motorway with steady traffic and a car in front of the driver breaking from time to time. Simultaneously, the driver had to judge simple true/false statements from the motor domain (e.g., “To open a jar, you turn the lid counterclockwise.”), the visual domain (e.g., “The letters on a stop sign are white.”), or the abstract domain (e.g., “The capital of North Dakota is Bismarck.”). As a baseline condition, people were just asked to say “true” or “false” several times.
Why choose such questions? There is both behavioural and brain-imaging evidence that language comprehension involves the simulation of what was said. This set of findings is often summarised as embodied cognition and its take-home message is something like this: in order to understand it, you mentally do it. For example, to answer a motor question, you use your brain areas doing motor control and make them simulate what it would be like to open a jar. Based on the outcome of this simulation you answer the question.
So, will visual or motor questions affect driving differently than abstract questions because the former engage the same brain areas as those needed for driving while the latter don’t? The alternative would be that asking anything distracts because general attention gets pulled away from driving.
The results go both ways. First, one measure was affected by the true/false statements but not by which kinds: quickly breaking when the car in front breaks. The time it took to do so was longer if any sort of question was asked compared to baseline. This suggests that domain general mechanisms were interfered with through language, e.g., attention.
Was she a safe driver? May depend on whether she talked and if so about what.
Second, one measure was affected by what kind of statements had to be judged:generally holding a safe distance to other cars. This distance was greater if visual questions were asked compared to abstract questions and compared to baseline. A similar, albeit not as clear, pattern emerged for motor questions. It looks as if participants were so distracted by these kinds of questions that they fell behind their optimal driving distance. This suggests that a task such as keeping a safe driving distance which requires visual working memory (compare ideal distance to actual distance) and corrective motor responses (bring ideal and actual distances closer together) is influenced by language comprehension through mental simulation.
On the one hand, the scientific implications are quite straight forward. Bergen and colleague’s results suggest that those low level perception and action control areas which are needed for quick reactions are not what embodied cognition is about. Instead it seems like embodied cognition happens in higher perceptual and motor planning areas. Furthermore, the whole embodied cognition idea gets quite a boost from a conceptual replication under relatively realistic conditions.
On the other hand, the practical implications are somewhat controversial. Because talking in general impairs quick reactions by the driver, even hands-free devices pose a risk. This danger is compounded by talking about abstract topics since the driving distance is reduced compared to visual topics.
The authors refrain from saying that any sort of conversation should be prohibited. Passengers share perceptual experiences with the driver and can adjust their conversations to the dangerousness of the situation. Mobile phone contacts can’t do this. But what if you want to be really really safe? Well, cut your own risk of dying and take public transport. There you can chat and cut your death risk by 90% (bus) or even 95% (train or flight) compared to car travel (EU numbers).
A safe way to travel.
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Bergen, B., Medeiros-Ward, N., Wheeler, K., Drews, F., & Strayer, D. (2012). The Crosstalk Hypothesis: Why Language Interferes With Driving. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 22612769
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images:
1) By Ed Brown as Edbrown05 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
You probably wouldn’t have much difficulty if I asked you to imagine a bad PowerPoint presentation. Nowadays one sits through so many of them that confusing, boring or annoying slide shows are sometimes perceived as the norm rather than the exception. A research team from the universities of Stanford, Amsterdam and Harvard headed by Stephen Kosslyn explains how to do it better. In order to reap off the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of visual aids, presenters should think about avoiding weaknesses of human information processing and play on the strengths of such processing.
Kosslyn and colleagues see the task of the audience viewing a PowerPoint presentation as composed of three steps: a) information needs to be acquired, b) information needs to be processed, c) information needs to be connected to knowledge. They derive eight principles that a presenter should follow based on this analysis.
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a) encoding, i.e. acquiring information and turning it into a usable form
1) Discriminability: make it easy for the audience to discriminate colours, letters, sizes, line orientations etc.
2) Perceptual Organisation: group things effectively in the visual space you’ve got
3) Salience: use large perceptual differences to guide attention to what is IMPORTANT
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b) working memory: holding information in mind in order to integrate it online
4) Limited Capacity: understanding breaks down once too much information has to be retained
5) Informative Change: when something perceptual changes, this change has to mean something
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c) accessing long term memory: connect the new information with knowledge in order to extract meaning.
6) Appropriate Knowledge: avoid as much novel concepts, jargon or symbols as possible
7) Compatibility: the meaning of a message needs to be compatible with its form
8) Relevance: provide neither too much nor too little information
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These principles may look very obvious but they are frequently violated. From an internet sample of slide shows it became clear that on average a PowerPoint presentation violates six principles at least once. Some principles were nearly always ignored: 1) discriminability, 4) limited capacity, 5) informative change.
Now, one may argue that these principles are simply guidelines that lay people are unaware of. No wonder they get violated. However, in a subsequent laboratory experiment participants were 80% correct in choosing a non-violating slide and rejecting a bad one. Moreover, when asked to say why one slide was better, more than 80% of the correct choices were appropriately justified.
So, this study is about what one already knows but still ignores when designing a slide show. The authors use a backdrop of psychological literature to predict what sorts of principles should guide PowerPoint presentations. What they, unfortunately, fail to do is to empirically test each principle’s impact on presentation understanding and memory. As such, this study simply presents a set of guidelines, says that presentations usually violate guidelines and that most people are aware of these violations. How important the guidelines are to begin with remains unclear.
The main take-home message is that the more work a presenter does for his/her audience, the more the audience can tune into the content of the presentation. For my part I am always guided by a more memorable principle:
Look around the room and search for the newbie or the bored one or the least intelligent listener. S/he is your target audience.
For a complete list of useful rules which may help you and especially your audience, see the appendix of Kosslyn and colleagues’ paper.
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Kosslyn S.M., Kievit R.A., Russell A.G., & Shephard J.M. (2012). PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis Front. Psychology, 3 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00230
Is it possible to predict with great certainty who will be crowned Europe’s best football* team this summer? No, but we are flooded with a barrage of statistics which try anyway, e.g. ‘Spain won the last competitions at European and World levels but no one ever went on to win the following European Championship after such a run, therefore Spain won’t win’. Because I neither like unreliable statistics nor understand all that much about football it is time to turn to Psychology and see what team it would put its bet on.
That team is Portugal, or indeed any other team with red jerseys.
In order to substantiate this claim one needs an intuitive theory and some well controlled experiments which support it. The theory is simply: red signals danger. This is seen both in our evolutionary past (e.g., our skin turns red when angry) and in our cultural past (e.g., red traffic lights). But football is different because the colours have no signalling quality other than to indicate team membership. Portuguese players are not constantly angry.
Poker. Loser on top.
Still, that doesn’t stop the danger signal from influencing behaviour as shown in a recently published set of experiments. Similar to football, poker chips just happen to be red sometimes. Femke Ten Velden and colleagues from Amsterdam looked at online poker strategies (article in press at Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). In a two player game, when holding the card 8 one has about an equal chance of winning and losing. In this experiment the (computer) opponent started the game by placing a bet. How would the participants react? Would they play aggressively and raise or instead fold because they predict a loss as well as little chance to bluff themselves out of it? When the opposing player happens to use red chips participants folded 63% of the time. When the opponent’s chip colour was white or blue, however, they folded only 18% and 24% of the time respectively. Perceived intimidation by the opponent mediated the effect of chip colour on Poker strategy – as if red chips make an opponent look more dangerous.
Does the effect also work the other way around? What happens when the participants themselves have red chips rather than white ones? In a follow-up experiment the participants started the game and indicated through the amount of the initial bet how aggressively they wanted to play. Furthermore, they indicated their feelings of dominance. Turns out that the red=intimidation effect does indeed also work the other way around: players who hold red chips place bigger bets than players holding white chips. This effect was mediated by subjective feelings of dominance.
So, playing against red is intimidating while playing in red increases competitiveness. So far, we have all the ingredients for a betting strategy for Euro 2012 based on Psychological findings: the theory predicts an effect whether you are on the nature side (evolution) or on the nurture side (culture) and that effect is seen in the lab under well controlled conditions. Time to turn to real life sports and see how these effects play out there.
Greco-Roman style. Winner on top.
Hill and Barton looked at combat sports during the 2004 Olympic Games and found competitors with red attire to win 55% of the time, those with blue attire 45% of the time. The effect was found in all the combat sports they looked at: boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling.
Finally, even in football the effect could be shown. During Euro 2004 five teams played some games in red shirts and other games in white or blue shirts. Wearing red increased the number of goals. Three years later the same research team (Attrill et al., 2008) looked at a bigger data set: 55 years of English football. The likelihood of winning the championship was greater than chance for red-wearing teams only. Furthermore, if they played at home – and thus actually wore their red shirts – these teams tended to score more points per game and won more often. On top of that, when looking at major cities with more than one football club, the one in red tends to have a better average league position over the long time period since WWII.
Thus, the red=intimidation effect appears to work in competitive sports as well. Psychology makes a clear recommendation: put your money on a red team. Because evidence from inside and outside the lab as well as nature/nurture reasoning support red teams.
So what? Red teams tend to have a bigger chance of winning but Germany (white/black) is still the team with the most Euro wins ever. Well, this post is not about Portugal’s guarantee to win, it is about their chances. Of course football is not a fashion show where what you wear counts more than what you do. But it is not exactly colour-blind either. Portugal has an advantage. Will they use it?
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Attrill, M. J., Gresty, K. A., Hill, R. A., & Barton, R. A. (2008). Red shirt colour is associated with long-term team success in English football Journal of Sports Sciences, 26, 577-582 DOI: 10.1080/02640410701736244 Felden, S.V. Ten, Baas, M., Shalvi, S., Preenen, P.T.Y., & Dreu, C.K.W. De (2012). In competitive interaction displays of red increase actors’ competitive approach and perceivers’ withdrawel Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.04.004 Hill, R. A., & Barton, R. A. (2005). Red enhances human performance in contests Nature, 435 DOI: 10.1038/435293a
But I’m a creep.
I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.
Why would anyone want to listen to this?
Radiohead’s song Creep is not the exception in being a heartbreaking but nonetheless successful song. According to Wikipedia , of the ten best-selling music singles ever several are clearly sad songs: Elton John’s Candle in the Wind, The Ink Spot’s If I didn’t care, or Kenny Roger’s Lady. Music does influence one’s mood. For that reason some psychological experiments even use it as a mood induction technique. But given that people generally strive for happiness, why would anyone willingly opt for sad music?
This is exactly what Van den Tol and Edwards asked people online (article in press at Psychology of Music). The most important function they identified in the responses was (re-)experiencing affect, i.e. listening to sad music in order to induce ‘sadness, loss or grief, and occasionally other negative feelings such as disappointment and anger’ (p. 10). Other functions were also mentioned but the take-home message is that, usually, sad music is chosen because it makes people – who are often already sad – feel sad. Very puzzling.
Even more puzzling is that these objectively negative feelings were only rarely reported as being experienced in a negative way. As if music-induced sadness is not quite like real sadness. Van den Tol and Edwards interpret their results as sad music being a sort of self-regulation tool. But how does the tool work?
No one really knows. Still, there are some ideas out there.
1) The safe distance theory
Thompson (2009; see Schubert, 1996) claims that musical sadness is unlike real sadness because, well, it isn’t actually real. It is without consequence. Therefore, one can explore a feeling without becoming engulfed in it. According to this hypothesis one can listen to Radiohead’s Creep and feel like a complete loser without actually having to be one.
It is difficult to test this because one would have to distinguish between participants’ safely distant sadness and their real sadness. I doubt that any ethical board would allow a researcher to deliberately sadden a participant for real.
2) The shared pain theory
Levitin (2008) claims that musical sadness serves to ‘[bring] us through stages of feeling understood, feeling less alone in the world, hopeful that if someone else recovered so will we’ (p. 135). Like in most of his book, Levitin sees music as a social tool. On this account, the difference between musical sadness and real sadness lies in the former one being shared while the latter one is more private. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind is a good example. Released following Lady Diana’s death, it perhaps helped people worldwide to share an emotion which they otherwise would have had to deal with by themselves.
3) The Prolactin theory
Prolactin is a hormone associated with feelings of tranquillity, calmness, well-being, or consolation. Huron (2011) suggests that the body uses it to counteract grief and thus avoid descending into an uncontrollably depressive episode. Such hormonal counter-measures to negative environmental inputs are also found for physical pain. Physical pain is reduced by endorphins. Such a bodily mechanism can be exploited – as when heroin addicts fool the brain’s response to pain. Huron (2011) proposes that sad music can activate the counter-measures to actual sadness – i.e. prolactin production – without any real sadness being present. One gets the hormone’s consoling effect without the sadness and might thus actually enjoy it.
On should not forget that -even though it is intuitive – Huron’s Prolactin theory is not supported by a great deal of experimental evidence. But at least it is straight forward to test.
Of course, all three theories could be true. The puzzle of people’s tendency to often listen to sad music could have to do with the safe distance between musically induced sadness and one’s true emotions. This distance may allow prolactin to have an unusually positive effect because it is not balanced by the real sadness it is designed to counteract. On top of that, a more cognitive appreciation of sharing this experience with other people may aid the process. Targeted research is needed in order to test these theories.
So, people do indeed strive for happiness and therefore enjoy energetic, upbeat music. However, when times get rough it can seem better to switch gears and deal with the sadness first before moving on. It appears like this is where sad music could come in. According to the three aforementioned theories, gloomy music not so much leads to bad moods. It is the other way around. Bad moods require sad music.
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Huron, D. (2011). Why is sad music pleasurable? A possible role for prolactin. Musica Scientiae, 15, 146-158. doi: 10.1177/1029864911401171
Levitin, D.J. (2008). The World in Six Songs. London: Aurum Press
Thompson, W.T. (2009). Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Van den Tol, A.J.M., Edwards, J. (in press). Exploring the rationale for choosing to listen to sad music when feeling sad. Psychology of Music. doi: 10.1177/0305735611430433
My father has seen his four children grow up and is still fascinated with the things that children do NOT know. He likens them to a new computer whose hard drive is still void of information and needs to be filled by a user, i.e. by their parents or other care takers. The computer metaphor is a very widely used one in the cognitive sciences. It turns out that for infant learning it is a misleading one. Rather than being like an empty disc which accumulates knowledge, infants act like explorers who use every bit of information they have in order to make sense of the unknown, to evaluate new inputs and ultimately to decide for themselves what to learn.
Zmyj and colleagues have an article in press in the journal Infant and Child Development which illustrates this nicely. 14 month old infants were presented with a new object: a lamp. Ordinarily lamps are switched on with hands (you knew that, right?) but infants were shown videos in which another person switches the lamp on using the head. Will children imitate them and, thus, show evidence for learning in terms of how to use a new object? They will, but it depends on how old the person in the video is. Most infants imitated an adult, less infants imitated a child aged three and a half, even less imitated another infant. This pattern of results makes intuitive sense. Instead of imitating any person blindly, infants trust people more who tend to be more knowledgeable given that they are older.
Previously, Seehagen and Herbert (2011) had found similar results for infants asked to imitate a person building a rattle. However, Zmyj and colleages went further and showed that a different pattern emerges when children see a person use toys in a rather intuitive way. Now, the infant peer was imitated most and the older child or the adult less. Infants appear to imitate people differently depending on whether they want to acquire knowledge (adults have more knowledge than infants) or whether they want to have fun (infants know better how to have fun than adults). Even before their second birthday, children decide for themselves who they turn to for learning.
Infants deciding what to learn? At 14 months they can hardly speak. They just started walking. Toilet training is still an issue. And they should decide for themselves? The aforementioned studies could perhaps be reinterpreted in a less extreme way. Perhaps appearances drive the effect. By 14 months the child could find an adult more like parents and, thus, trust an adult more for learning novel things. It is imaginable that the child identified better with fellow infants when there is nothing to learn and, thus, imitates them more. This argument is not only a bit constructed, it is also contradicted by a bunch of publications contrasting two adults rather than an adult and an infant.
Chow and colleagues presented infants with either an adult who is reliable or an adult who is not. The unreliable adult would express great happiness when looking into a container even though the container is empty. Children may find such an adult a bit odd. His actions do not really match expectations. Chow and colleagues (2008) found infants to be more hesitant in exploring a container which an unreliable informant claimed contained a nice object. They followed a reliable adult’s information faster. The same or a similar manipulation of an adult’s reliability also changes other infant behaviours:
- their looks behind a barrier to see what the adult is going on about (Chow et al., 2008)
- their surprise at seeing the adult look in the wrong direction in order to find an object (Poulin-Dubois and Chow, 2009)
- their imitation of the head movement to switch on the aforementioned new lamp (Poulin-Dubois et al., 2011; Zmyj et al., 2010).
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Infants are not like a container which you can fill with knowledge. The computer metaphor of an empty hard drive simply does not hold. Every new bit of information is evaluated in terms of where it comes from. This evaluation itself is driven by what the infant already knows. It is as if children try to coat themselves against unreliable information. Before toddlers have seen their second birthday cake they show a higher level of self-guided learning than parents realise. You better don’t act unreliable in front of them!
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Chow, V., Poulin-Dubois, D., & Lewis, J. (2008). To see or not to see: infants prefer to follow the gaze of a reliable looker. Developmental Science, 11, 761-770. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00726.x
Poulin-Dubois, D., & Chow, V. (2009). The Effect of a Looker’s Past Reliability on Infants’ Reasoning About Beliefs. Developmental Psychology, 45, 1576-1582. doi: 10.1037/a0016715
Poulin-Dubois, D., Brooker, I., & Polonia, A. (2011). Infants prefer to imitate a reliable person. Infant Behavior and Development, 34, 303-309. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2011.01.006
Seehagen, S., & Herbert, J.S. (2011). Infant Imitation From Televised Peer and AdultModels. Infancy, 16, 113-136. doi: 10.1111/j.1532-7078.2010.00045.x
Zmyj, N., Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., & Daum, M.M. (2010). The reliability of a model influences 14-moth-olds’ imitation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 106, 208-220. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.03.002
Zmyj, N., Daum, M.M., Prinz, W., Nielsen, M., & Aschersleben, G. (in press). Fourteen-month-olds’ imitation of differently aged models. Infant and Child Development. doi: 10.1002/icd.750
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![By Hardeep Singh from Vancouver, Canada (Mohkam Mopping) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Mohkam_Mopping.jpg "By Hardeep Singh from Vancouver, Canada (Mohkam Mopping) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
