Verbalising Our Appreciation of Art Influences Our Preferences

Talking about art can influence our appreciation of it. That’s what Ayumi Yamada found by asking half of 129 students to either verbalise their reasons for liking two paintings or their reasons for not liking them. One piece was representational, the other piece was abstract. The remaining participants were used as a controls and were only asked to view the paintings.

The participants who were asked to verbalize their reasons for liking the artworks were more likely to prefer the representational painting. Those who verbalised their reasons for disliking the paintings were also more likely to dislike the representational painting.

The results showed that verbalising their appreciation of art influenced the participants’ preferences. Yamada explained these findings suggesting that “due to its figurative qualities people will be encouraged to generate reasons to describe representational art, rather than abstract art, and that these reasons could potentially be biased and cause them to change their preferences in line with these reasons”.

Link to the original study

Multitasking, Male Attractiveness, Neurotic Nerds and other interesting studies (more links)..

Bad news for multitaskers… A group of Stanford researchers found out that media multitaskers do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time… Read more here and here.

Penn State psychologists attempt to explain how women evaluate facial attractiveness. It seems that they evaluate facial attractiveness on two levels: a sexual level and a non-sexual one. More on Science Daily’s article.

You can find a very interesting blogpost on The Neurocritic: Studious Nerds Are Neurotic and Party Animals Are Antisocial.

Whether you like babies or not, I’d highly recommend Radiolab’s podcast on a baby’s experience of the world. Read more about in on Mind Hacks.

Blindsight: The Blind Man Who Can See..

Blindsight is rare and strange condition. People suffering from blindsight respond to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them.  V. S. Ramachandran has an interesting theory about this:

Interesting links:

Short clip from Beatrice de Gelder’s famous Blindsight study
Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense – article
Seeing What You Don’t See
Mystery of “Blindsight” Lets Some Blind People “See,” Study Shows – National Geographic
Blindsight and Consciousness
Blindsight in monkeys
Blindsight revisited (pdf)

On a diet? Try a chocolate cake… wallpaper!

The recent finding of a study conducted by psychologist Floor Kroese of Utrecht University in the Netherlands could make the life of weight-conscious people easier. Kroese contrary to popural beliefs speculated that temptation might in fact heighten self-control and encourage people to make healthier food choices. These hypotheses were based on counteractive control theory according to which temptations trigger goal-directed behaviour.

The hypotheses were tested by asking  54 female students to look at a picture of either a slice of chocolate cake or a flower. The true nature of this experiment wasn’t revealed to the participants. They were told it was a memory test. Then the researchers questioned the students about their plans to eat healthier and offered them a choice between a chocolate or oatmeal cookie.
The participants earlier shown the picture of the cake seemed more motivated to make healthier choices and were significantly more likely than the ones shown the flower to pick the oatmeal cookie.
It seems that the sight of food instead of triggering indulgence reminded the weight-conscious women their goal and encourage them to act accordingly.
Kroese suggests that sticking pictures of tempting foods on the fridge door may help to bring weight-watching goals to mind. However, we aren’t yet sure if the effects will be similar in people who don’t really want to lose weight.

P.S.: Time to test my chocolate cake wallpaper…

The original study

Suggested Readings:

Leading Us Not Unto Temptation: Momentary Allurements Elicit Overriding Goal Activation
Healthy Cognition: Processes of Self-Regulatory Success in Restrained Eating
When impulses take over: Moderated predictive validity of explicit and implicit attitude measures in predicting food choice and consumption behaviour
The Allure of Forbidden Food: A Goal Conflict Perspective On Dieting
Photos of cake can keep you slim, say psychologists

Does time really slow down during frightening events?

Overestimation of time duration is often reported during brief, dangerous or possibly life threatening events, like car accidents, robberies or attacks. Observers mention that time feels like slowing down and everything seems to move in slow motion. Does time resolution really increase during the event or is it all an illusion?

Chess Stetson, Matthew P. Fiesta and David M. Eagleman (2007) decided to test this hypothesis. Using a hand-held device to measure speed of visual perception, they made volunteers free fall for 31 m before landing safely in a net. This device displayed a series of digits in high speed, so that they couldn’t be read by the  by the participants. The idea was that if time really slows down while we experience a frightening event (free falling), the participants could successfully read some or all of the digits displayed on the device’s screen. In addition to that, after landing they were asked to make duration judgements about their fall and the fall of others.

Although the participants  free-falling from 50 meters experienced a duration expansion,  no evidence of increased temporal resolution was found. Contrary to the initial hypothesis, they failed to read the digits that were displayed on the hand-held device. The results of this study don’t support the hypothesis that subjective time as a whole runs in slow motion during frightening events. The researchers suggest that the slowing of time that’s reported is a function of our recollection and not perception:

“The involvement of the amygdala in emotional memory may lead to dilated
duration judgments retrospectively, due to a richer, and perhaps
secondary encoding of the memories. Upon later readout,
such highly salient events may be erroneously interpreted to have
spanned a greater period of time.”

You can read the original study here.

Further Reading:

Changing Time and Emotions – Pierre-Yves Geoffard & Stéphane Luchini (2007)
Time and the Brain: How Subjective Time Relates to Neural Time – David M. Eagleman, Peter U. Tse, Dean Buonomano, Peter Janssen, Anna Christina Nobre & Alex O. Holcombe (2005)

Others Do It Better: A Few Interesting Links

It’s summer, but it’s the busiest time for me. I’m trying to find a place to stay in London and I have to spend most of my time searching.. I didn’t have time to write anything, so I’ll just mention a few links to  neuroscience, psychology posts that I liked this week:

1. BPS Research Digest Blog has a very interesting article about kids with invisible friends. A study by Gabriel Trionfi and Elaine Reese showed that these children have superior narrative skills… Read more here

2. Cognitive Daily inspired by summer holiday photos tells us how the brain divides the task of recognising sounds.

3. Read about the scientific study of beauty at “The Psychology of Beauty” latest blogpost: When Attractive Isn’t Beautiful

4. One of my favourite articles of the week at bjoern.brembs.blog: Don’t stress the scientists!

5. New Scientists’: “Out-of-body experiences help bring avatars to life”

6. The Psych Student on “How copyright enforcement inspires pirate behavior”

7.  Finally, a funny but  interesting article on Neuroskeptic: “Tickling Rats For Science”

P.S: I’ll be back with a real blogpost soon.

Romantic Jealousy Effects on Cognitive Functioning

Most of us are familiar with Jealousy in romantic relationships, which is triggered primarily by infidelity, a significant threat to people’s long-term romantic relationships. Under this scope, jealousy is an effective mechanism to guard relationships.

Dr. Jon Maner of the University of Florida and his team studied the effect of romantic jealousyon implicit, low-level cognitive functioning. According to the results of the study, the fear of losing a partner affects the brain by hijacking attention and memory systems. This finding was more evident in the case of people displaying high chronic levels of romantic jealousy.

Dr Maner and his team suggested that concerns about infidelity may evoke a functionally coordinated cascade of cognitive biases, each aimed at guarding against threats posed by possible romantic competitors. Specifically, concerns about infidelity could strengthen encoding and memory for possible romantic rivals.

The researchers conducted four studies with hundreds of heterosexual student participants. The participants that showed high levels of chronic jealousy displayed enhanced encoding and memory for attractive same-sex targets. On the other hand, No effects were observed in people less inclined to worry about the threat of infidelity.

Furthermore, concerns about infidelity seem to promote intrasexual vigilance – cognitive biases and attunements directed at selectively processing attractive members of one’s own sex. More specifically, participants with high levels of jealousy process vigilantly only members of their own sex, who were rated highly attractive. Not only did they attend to attractive same-sex people but they also encoded, remembered and successfully identified them later on.

Suggested readings:

The Original Paper

How romantic jealousy hijacks the mind

Jealousy as a Function of Rival Characteristics: An Evolutionary Perspective

Automatic inattention to attractive alternatives: the evolved psychology of relationship maintenance

Can’t Take My Eyes off You: Attentional Adhesion to Mates and Rivals

(picture: “Jealousy by Steven Stahlberg)