Girls’ brains can begin maturing from the age of 10 while some men have to wait until 20 before the same organisational structures take place, Newcastle University scientists have found.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

Men who have daughters also grow less attached to traditional gender roles: they become less likely to agree with the statement that “a woman’s place is in the home,” for instance, and more likely to agree that men should wash dishes and do other chores. Having a sister, however, has the opposite effect, making men more supportive of traditional gender roles, more conservative politically, and less likely to perform housework.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

Although there has been some empirical research on earworms, songs that become caught and replayed in one’s memory over and over again, there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the more general concept of the musical hook, the most salient moment in a piece of music, or the even more general concept of what may make music ‘catchy’. […]

Every piece of music will have a hook – the catchiest part of the piece, whatever that may be – but some pieces of music clearly have much catchier hooks than others. […]

One study has shown that after only 400 ms, listeners can identify familiar music with a significantly greater frequency than one would expect from chance. […]

We have designed an experiment that we believe will help to quantify the effect of catchiness on musical memory. […] Hooked, as we have named the game, comprises three essential tasks: a recognition task, a verification task, and a prediction task. Each of them responds to a scientific need in what we felt was the most entertaining fashion possible. In this way, we hope to be able recruit the largest number of subjects possible without sacrificing scientific quality.

{ Music Cognition Group | PDF | Download the Game }

Neuman examined three common types of fallacious arguments:

• The false cause fallacy.
• The appeal to the people fallacy.
• The appeal to ignorance fallacy.

An argument using the false cause fallacy […]: I watered my lawn and then it rained. It must have rained because I watered my lawn.

An argument that appeals to the people […]: Most people believe that extraterrestrials exist, so you should too.

An argument that includes an appeal to ignorance […]: We know that Big Foot exists, because no one has been able to prove that it doesn’t.

Neuman’s idea is that the ability to detect fallacious arguments, such as these, is related to skill in drawing inferences from text. In order to test his idea, Neuman measured student’s performance on detection of argument fallacies, deductive logic, and the inference process in reading comprehension.

He found that comprehension was significantly related to spotting fallacies. Performance on the pure deductive logic task was not.

{ Global Cognition | Continue reading }

image { Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman, Production still from Shadow, 2010 }

In previous research, acoustic characteristics of the male voice have been shown to signal various aspects of mate quality and threat potential. But the human voice is also a medium of linguistic communication. The present study explores whether physical and vocal indicators of male mate quality and threat potential are linked to effective communicative behaviors such as vowel differentiation and use of more salient phonetic variants of consonants. […]

[T]aller, more masculine men display less clarity in their speech and prefer phonetic variants that may be associated with masculine attributes such as toughness.

{ Human Nature/Springer | Continue reading }

We evaluated the impact of different presentation methods for evaluating how funny jokes are. We found that the same joke was perceived as significantly funnier when told by a robot than when presented only using text.

{ Dr. Hato | PDF }

Ongoing projects: Adding farting to the joking robots.

{ Dr. Hato | Continue reading }

Specifically, they reported that men’s brains had more connectivity within each brain hemisphere, whereas women’s brains had more connectivity across the two hemispheres. Moreover, they stated or implied, in their paper and in statements to the press, that these findings help explain behavioral differences between the sexes, such as that women are intuitive thinkers and good at multi-tasking whereas men are good at sports and map-reading. […]

So, the wiring differences between the sexes aren’t that large. And we don’t really know their functional significance, if any. […]

[L]et’s set this new brain wiring study in the context of previous research. Verma and her team admit that a previous paper looking at the brain wiring of 439 participants failed to find significant differences between the sexes. What about studies on the corpus callosum – the thick bundle of fibres that connects the two brain hemispheres? If women really have more cross-talk across the brain, this is one place where you’d definitely expect them to have more connectivity. And yet a 2012 diffusion tensor paper found “a stronger inter-hemispheric connectivity between the frontal lobes in males than females”. Hmm. Another paper from 2006 found little difference in thickness of the callosum according to sex. Finally a meta-analysis from 2009: “The alleged sex-related corpus callosum size difference is a myth,” it says.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

A small sample of the more credulous media uptake:

“Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal”, The Guardian 12/2/2013

“Striking differences in brain wiring between men and women”, EarthSky 12/3/2013
“Is Equal Opportunity Threatened By New Findings That Female And Male Brains Are Different?”, Forbes 12/3/2013

”The hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are ‘better at map reading’ and why women are ‘better at remembering a conversation’”, The Independent 12/3/2013

”Sex and Brains: Vive la différence!”, The Economist 12/7/2013

“Differences in How Men and Women Think Are Hard-Wired”, WSJ 12/9/2013
“Brains of women, men are actually wired differently”, New Scientist 12/12/2013
“Gender differences are hard-wired”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 12/15/2013

Some more thoughtful reactions:

“Study: The Brains of Men and Women Are Different… WIth A Few Major Caveats”, Forbes 12/8/2013
“Do Men And Women Have Different Brains?”, NPR 12/13/2013
“Time to ditch the ‘Venus and Mars’ cliche”, The New Zealand Herald 12/14/2013

{ Language Log | Continue reading }

art { Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Sylvette David in Green Chair, 1954 }

The eminent sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that life is a series of performances, in which we are all continually managing the impression we give other people. […]

But recently we have learned that some of our social responses occur even without conscious consideration. […] [L]ab experiments show that when people happen to be holding a hot drink rather than a cold one, they are more likely to trust strangers. Another found that people are much more helpful and generous when they step off a rising escalator than when they step off a descending escalator—in fact, ascending in any fashion seems to trigger nicer behavior. […]

Neuroscientists have found that environmental cues trigger immediate responses in the human brain even before we are aware of them. As you move into a space, the hippocampus, the brain’s memory librarian, is put to work immediately. It compares what you are seeing at any moment to your earlier memories in order to create a mental map of the area, but it also sends messages to the brain’s fear and reward centers. Its neighbor, the hypothalamus, pumps out a hormonal response to those signals even before most of us have decided if a place is safe or dangerous. Places that seem too sterile or too confusing can trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones associated with fear and anxiety. Places that seem familiar, navigable, and that trigger good memories, are more likely to activate hits of feel-good  serotonin, as well as the hormone that rewards and promotes feelings of interpersonal trust: oxytocin.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Dennis Stock }

What if the universe had no beginning, and time stretched back infinitely without a big bang to start things off? That’s one possible consequence of an idea called “rainbow gravity,” so-named because it posits that gravity’s effects on spacetime are felt differently by different wavelengths of light, aka different colors in the rainbow. […]

“It’s a model that I do not believe has anything to do with reality,” says Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

Antidepressants are often considered to be mere placebos despite the fact that meta-analyses are able to rank them. It follows that it should also be possible to rank different placebos, which are all made of sucrose. To explore this issue, which is rather more epistemological than clinical, we designed an unusual meta-analysis to investigate whether the effects of placebo in one situation are different from the effects of placebo in another situation.

{ BMC Medecine | Continue reading }

photo { Maurizio Di Iorio }

Being bored has just become a little more nuanced, with the addition of a fifth type of boredom by which to describe this emotion. […]

The study builds on preliminary research done by Goetz and colleague Anne Frenzel in 2006 in which they differentiated between four types of boredom according to the levels of arousal (ranging from calm to fidgety) and how positive or negative boredom is experienced (so-called valence). These were indifferent boredom (relaxed, withdrawn, indifferent), calibrating boredom (uncertain, receptive to change/distraction), searching boredom (restless, active pursuit of change/distraction) and reactant boredom (high reactant, motivated to leave a situation for specific alternatives).

The researchers have now identified another boredom subtype, namely apathetic boredom, an especially unpleasant form that resembles learned helplessness or depression. It is associated with low arousal levels and high levels of aversion.

{ Springer | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Carrithers }

Teenagers’ brains are wired to confront a threat instead of retreating, research suggests. The results may help explain why criminal activity peaks during adolescence.

{ Science News | Continue reading }

Research in recent years has suggested that young Americans might be less creative now than in decades past, even while their intelligence — as measured by IQ tests — continues to rise.

But new research from the University of Washington Information School and Harvard University, closely studying 20 years of student creative writing and visual artworks, hints that the dynamics of creativity may not break down as simply as that.

Instead, it may be that some aspects of creativity — such as those employed in visual arts — are gently rising over the years, while other aspects, such as the nuances of creative writing, could be declining. […]

The review of student visual art showed an increase in the sophistication and complexity both in the designs and the subject matter over the years. The pieces, Davis said, seemed “more finished, and fuller, with backgrounds more fully rendered, suggesting greater complexity.” Standard pen-and-ink illustrations grew less common over the period studied, while a broader range of mixed media work was represented.

Conversely, the review of student writing showed the young authors adhering more to “conventional writing practices” and a trend toward less play with genre, more mundane narratives and simpler language over the two decades studied.

{ University of Washington | Continue reading }

Our brains perceive objects in everyday life of which we may never be aware, a study finds, challenging currently accepted models about how the brain processes visual information. […]

“There’s a brain signature for meaningful processing,” Sanguinetti said. A peak in the averaged brainwaves called N400 indicates that the brain has recognized an object and associated it with a particular meaning.

“It happens about 400 milliseconds after the image is shown, less than a half a second,” said Peterson. “As one looks at brainwaves, they’re undulating above a baseline axis and below that axis. The negative ones below the axis are called N and positive ones above the axis are called P, so N400 means it’s a negative waveform that happens approximately 400 milliseconds after the image is shown.”

The presence of the N400 peak indicates that subjects’ brains recognize the meaning of the shapes on the outside of the figure.

“The participants in our experiments don’t see those shapes on the outside; nonetheless, the brain signature tells us that they have processed the meaning of those shapes,” said Peterson. “But the brain rejects them as interpretations, and if it rejects the shapes from conscious perception, then you won’t have any awareness of them.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

{ How to fix global warming before it’s too late | Is it too late to prepare for climate change? }

“Recent studies show that when a person looks similar to ourselves, we automatically believe they are trustworthy. Here we show for the first time that the reverse is also true. When a person is shown to be more trustworthy, it can lead us to perceive that person as looking more similar to ourselves,” said researcher Harry Farmer.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

art { Tim Geoghegan, Influence Deflection Helmet, 2013 }

George E. P. Box is famous for the quote: “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” […]

In my experience, most models outside of physics are heuristic models. The models are designed as caricatures of reality, and built to be wrong while emphasizing or communicating some interesting point. Nobody intends these models to be better and better approximations of reality, but a toolbox of ideas. Although sometimes people fall for their favorite heuristic models, and start to talk about them as if they are reflecting reality, I think this is usually just a short lived egomania. As such, pointing out that these models are wrong is an obvious statement: nobody intended them to be not wrong. Usually, when somebody actually calls such a model “wrong” they actually mean “it does not properly highlight the point it intended to” or “the point it is highlighting is not of interest to reality”. As such, if somebody says that your heuristic model is wrong, they usually mean that it’s not useful and Box’s defense is of no help.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are abstractions, these sort of models are rigorous mathematical statements about specific types of structures. These models are right and true of their subjects in any reasonable definition of the words. They are as right or true as the statement that there are infinite number of primes; or that in Euclidean geometry, the tree angles of a triangle sum to two right angles. When somebody says that an abstraction is wrong, they mean one of two things:

1. It is mathematically false. […]

2. Or, the structure you are applying it to does not meet the requirements of the abstraction. For example, in general relativity, space is non-Euclidean, so triangles don’t sum to 180 degrees.

{ Theory, Evolution, and Game Groups | Continue reading }

I think you are missing out on some ideas on complexity. […] What makes you think that something mathematical is comprehensible? You already invoked one simple form of incomprehension: undecidability in computing. […] As to a belief that the universe is not “mathematical”: well, what else could it possibly be? Many mathematicians define mathematics as the sum-total of all possibility; to say that something isn’t mathematical is tantamount to saying it isn’t possible. Since there is nothing else that it could be, by law of excluded middle, it must be.

{ Linas Vepstas | Continue reading }

Hmmm, no edit-button to correct my post. Some footnotes, then: […]

Box’s quote is kind-of the mirror image of Kolmogorov complexity, which states that a model is useful only if it is smaller than the thing being modelled, and, what’s more, that there are things that cannot be modeled.

{ Linas Vepstas | Continue reading }

Even though boys express a wider range of emotions than girls do as infants, boys are typically discouraged from showing their emotions as they grow older due to traditional ideas about masculinity and gender roles. Crying frequency between boys and girls shows little difference until the age of eleven or twelve when girls overtake boys. 

Being told that “big boys don’t cry,” boys are socialized against any display of strong emotion considered inappropriate while crying is specifically targeted as being “feminine” behaviour. There can be enormous culture differences over when and under what circumstances men and women are allowed to cry but men are often expected to be more stoic and unemotional in most situations. […]

Though crying among men seems more tolerated, there are still strong biases against men crying in public. In a 2001 study of undergraduate males in the United States, only 23 percent of males reported crying when feeling helpless as opposed to 58 percent of females with similar sex differences being noted in the United Kingdom and Israel.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen DiRado, Martha’s Vineyard/Beach People: Aquinnah, MA. }

According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the universe should be empty. Matter and antimatter, which are identical except for their opposite electric charges, seem to be produced in equal parts during particle interactions and decays. However, matter and antimatter instantly annihilate each other upon contact, and so equal amounts of each would have meant a wholesale annihilation of both shortly after the Big Bang. The existence of galaxies, planets and people illustrates that somehow, a small surplus of matter survived this canceling process. If that hadn’t happened, “the universe would be void,” Schönert said.

The explanation for the survival of some matter may lie in subatomic particles called neutrinos. These particles might have a special property that would give rise to neutrino-less double beta decay.

{ Quanta | Continue reading }

Our ability to exhibit self-control to avoid cheating or lying is significantly reduced over the course of a day, making us more likely to be dishonest in the afternoon than in the morning, according to findings published in Psychological Science.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Johan Rosenmunthe }

Earlier studies already showed that people that just experienced or recalled an embarrassing situation — that is a public action that observers could consider as foolish or inappropriate — often feel motivated to avoid social contact or to repair their image. Sunglasses and restorative cosmetics could help with that. A team of researchers now investigated the actual effectiveness of these coping strategies. […]

Hiding the face and repairing the face weren’t equally effective in these experiments. Face restoring products seemed to relieve feelings of embarrassment and restore willingness to interact with others. Simply hiding the face didn’t seem to help.

{ United-Academics | Continue reading }