Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

Cultural differences in athlete attributions for success and failure: The sports pages revisited.

"Jointly, the two studies show an overlap in the content of convicted rapists’ talk and the contents of contemporary lads’ mags ... "

American psych textbooks ignore Russian psychologists.

Becoming an expert in the layout of London's streets (i.e. learning The Knowledge) enlarges the posterior  of the hippocampus.

Home teams still enjoy an advantage even when the stadium is empty.

Learning Words through Listening to Hip-Hop.

Are systemizing and autistic traits related to talent and interest in mathematics and engineering? Testing some of the central claims of the empathizing–systemizing theory.

Insights into psychopathy garnered from brain imaging.

"... our results suggest that self-motion perception and numerical cognition can mutually influence each other."

50 years of pupillometry in psychology - the measurement of the diameter of the pupil and factors that influence it.

The joy of seeing your football team win lasts longer than the pain caused by seeing them lose.

Why individuals in larger teams perform worse.

Humble people are more helpful.

Small scale study finds generalised benefit of brain training games for the elderly.

You're more likely to regret making a material purchase (than an experiential purchase), and more likely to regret NOT making an experiential purchase.

People with high status perceive the applause after their performance as louder and more favourable.

EEG of a man's brain whilst he met with imaginary friends.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

A cautionary tale about using psychology to boost your Valentine's chances

As he prepared for his blind date, Kevin was determined to leave nothing to chance. For starters, his date for Valentine's evening thought his name was Jake. You see, Kevin was a shrewd chap who'd decided he was going to use all the latest psychological science to boost his romantic chances. A recent paper showed that unfashionable names could put people off. He'd even made a name badge with Jake written in bold, and pinned it to his (carefully chosen) bright red shirt.

That was one of the easier lessons to implement. The fake scar, a long, jagged line down his right cheek, was trickier to get hold off. Of course, he was also wearing his boots with the chunky heels. He'd also been listening to Barry White tapes to help practise speaking with a more manly voice than usual. Attention to detail, that was key, Kevin kept telling himself, attention to detail. And so he slid onto his ring finger a rubber witch's finger (he'd spotted that at the shop that sold the scar make-up) - he reasoned this should help him achieve the ideal digit-ratio.

Time was ticking, she was due to arrive soon. Kevin suppressed his nerves and pressed play on his stereo. "Je l’aime à mourir" by French songwriter Francis Cabrel filled his apartment - this was the very song they'd used in another pertinent research paper he'd read. "Ha! The lyrics are perfect," Kevin thought to himself as he implemented another of his strategies, leaning near the front door a coffin he'd borrowed from a theatrical friend.

Oh dear, you can't control everything ... Kevin cursed his rumbling stomach - was it the nerves or his recent (carefully selected) vegetable-only diet? Kevin wasn't sure. "Never-mind, nearly there," he thought as he pulled on his Porsche cap and pinned an RSPCA badge to his lapel. Now, fingers crossed his neighbour and her friend would do their part just as he'd asked.

Lisa, a French student at the local university, climbed the stairs, nervously excited about the evening that lay ahead. A mutual friend had said that Jake was interested in psychology, which sounded promising. Lisa knocked gently on the white door. To this day, she will never forget what happened next.

The door opened revealing a tall man, a livid scar running down his face, a baseball cap atop his head. This was obviously Jake - a badge on his bright shirt said as much. The words "I love her to death" (in French) blasted out from the apartment's interior. Over the man's shoulder Lisa could see a large, cardboard coffin leaning against the wall. Suddenly two young women burst forth from the neighbouring apartment. They drew nearer and began gazing at the man silently, big smiles on their faces. Awkwardness hung in the air.

"Hi, erm, I'm Lisa," Lisa managed to mutter, just about controlling her urge to run. "Hi, I'm Lisa," the man echoed her words with a gravelly voice and a nervous chuckle. "Please come in," he said, reaching out and touching her on the arm, a wrinkly witch's finger protruding from his hand.

Lisa turned and ran, and ran.

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If this hasn't put you off, here's a list of evidence-based Valentine's advice I put together earlier.
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Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest, with apologies to people called Kevin.

At what age do babies enter the uncanny valley?

In the 1970s, the roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed a curious phenomenon. As robots became more human-like, their appeal increased but only up to a point. When their human likeness became too realistic (but still not perfect), their appeal plunged. Mori nicknamed this abrupt aversion "the uncanny valley", in reference to the shape of the graph mapping human-likeness and appeal. Are we born with this aversion to the almost-real or does it emerge later?

To find out, David Lewkowicz and Asif Ghazanfar presented nearly a hundred infants (aged between 6 to 12 months) with pairs of faces, to see which they would look at for longer. In the first study, the babies were shown a human face alongside a cartoon face (an "avatar") with enlarged goggle-eyes. The researchers said adults would find the avatar uncanny and would avoid looking at. The key finding here was that six-month-olds spent more time looking at the uncanny avatar, whereas the twelve-month-olds, like adults, spent more time looking at the human face. Based on this dramatic contrast in preference, Lewkowicz and Ghazanfar said the uncanny valley effect emerges gradually between six and twelve months of age.

What was it about the faces that provoked this change in preference in the older babies? In two further studies, the researchers presented the babies with either a goggle-eyed uncanny avatar alongside a more realistic avatar face with normal-sized eyes, or with a human face alongside the realistic avatar. In the first case, all the babies, from 6 to 12 months, spent more time looking at the realistic avatar. In the second case, the babies of all ages spent equal amounts of time looking at the two faces.

These results suggest that none of the babies could distinguish between the realistic avatar and a real human face, and that the older babies in the first study, and all the babies in the second study, must therefore have been using the enlarged eyes to distinguish the goggle-eyed avatar from a human face or realistic avatar face, respectively.

Lewkowicz and Ghazanfar said that the aversion to the goggle-eyed uncanny avatar likely emerged in the older babies as a consequence of their growing expertise with processing human faces, and their association of human faces with positive consequences. However, the older babies' expertise was obviously far from complete because they were unable to tell a realistic avatar from a human face. By 12 months, they can spot uncanny features, it seems, but not a synthetic face. "This limitation, particularly at the end of the first year of life, is interesting," the researchers said, "because infants of this age have already become sufficiently specialised for human faces that they no longer discriminate the faces of other species and of other races [a process known as perceptual narrowing]".

This study builds on recent research showing evidence of the uncanny valley effect in monkeys. From an evolutionary perspective, the researchers said their results were consistent with the idea that the uncanny valley effect emerges as a result of early developmental experience and was "a useful behavioural adaptation because it enables observers to quickly detect anomalies (e.g. disease) and/or aesthetic value (i.e. beauty) of a face."

Critics of this research may feel that it is rather a leap to assume that the uncanny feeling experienced by adults is felt by babies in any way, just because they look at a face more or less. Moreover, the classic uncanny valley effect is about almost-real robots and faces. This study arguably complicates the issue somewhat by introducing specific abnormal features onto synthetic faces, therefore making them look unreal. Whilst it's been shown that abnormal features, such as enlarged eyes, are perceived as uncanny by adults, this could be a different effect from the discomfort caused by not-quite-perfect hyper-realistic entities.

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Lewkowicz, D., and Ghazanfar, A. (2012). The development of the uncanny valley in infants Developmental Psychobiology, 54 (2), 124-132 DOI: 10.1002/dev.20583

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feast

Tuck into our round-up of the latest and best psych and neuro links:

A Dangerous Method: David Cronenberg's film about the relationship between Freud, Jung and Spielrein, opens across the UK this weekend. The Guardian calls it "a cool, measured, loquacious film".

This week, BBC One broadcast two episodes of Super Smart Animals about animal intelligence - both are now available on iPlayer for the next 6 days.

The Atlantic published a fascinating in-depth interview with bioethicist Allen Buchanan (author of Better Than Human) about the potential pros and cons of cognitive enhancement technologies.

A new report from the Kings Fund claims that the NHS is losing billions of pounds by failing to address the mental health needs of people with long-term illness.

Nature Neuroscience has published an obituary and suite of free-to-access Jon Driver articles in memory of the great cognitive neuroscientist, who died late last year.

The UK government's Behavioural Insight Team has published a new report into psychologically-informed ways to reduce fraud, error and debt.

The Royal Society has published its latest Brainwaves report, this one examines possible applications of neuroscience for military and civilian law enforcement.

One to watch: The newly launched PsyCh Journal claims to be China's first international journal.

The Chronicle had a super overview and ethical discussion of the work of Adrian Raine, who studies developmental brain markers of later criminality.

Guardian blogger Mo Costandi reported on a new study that compared the way human and monkey brains responded to the experience of watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Guardian published a summary of the widespread concerns about psychiatry's revision of its diagnostic code.

Prime Minister Cameron said this week that we need more women in the country's boardrooms. Our sister blog, the Occupational Digest published an overview of research into the Glass Cliff - the tendency for women to be appointed to leadership positions when an organisation is in crisis.

PLoS Blogger Steve Silberman published an interview with synaesthete Perry Hall. Hall has created an App called Sonified that allows the less-synaesthetic among us to experience a morphing of the senses. In related news, veteran Times columnist Matthew Parris wrote in the paper this week that he's experienced synaesthesia all his life, but only just discovered that the condition has a name, and that his experiences aren't shared by everyone.

Starting tomorrow at 2.30pm and continuing on Sunday, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting dramatisations of two of Freud's classic case studies - Dora and the Wolfman.

That's all, have a mindful weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Doubts cast on the influential dual-stream theory of visual processing

Psychologists in Germany have challenged one of the most influential theories in neuropsychology - the dual stream model of visual processing proposed by Mel Goodale and David Milner. This model proposes that visual information entering the brain splits down two parallel paths: the dorsal path heads to the top and rear of the brain where the information is used for guiding actions; the ventral path reaches the temporal lobes where it is used for conscious perception and recognition. The model is hugely influential and will be familiar to all contemporary psychology graduates. The three seminal papers proposing and supporting the model have been cited over 930 times.

Much of the supporting evidence came from studies of the brain-damaged patient known in the literature as D.F. This woman's damage to her occipital and parietal lobes from carbon monoxide poisoning appeared to have left her with a rare form of "visual agnosia" - she was unable to recognise everyday objects but was perfectly able to grasp and use them. In other words, she appeared to have an impaired ventral stream but a preserved dorsal stream.

Marc Himmelbach and his team at Eberhard Karls University say that D.F. has become one of the most influential brain-damaged patients in neuropsychology, comparable to Paul Broca's aphasic patient Leborgne and Phineas Gage - the nineteenth century railway worker who survived an iron rod passing through his brain. However, as is the case with Leborgne and Gage, the German team believe that standards of testing have become more stringent since the seminal work with D.F. was published back in the 90s. In particular, conclusions were drawn about D.F. without comparing her performance and behaviour to age-matched controls.

For their paper, Himmelbach and his team have replicated the three main tests performed on D.F. with 20 female, age-matched healthy controls (mean age 36.5 years). These tests included indicating the size of various rectangular wooden blocks using the thumb and forefinger; actually reaching and picking up the blocks; indicating the orientation of a narrow slot in a disc; posting a card through that slot; and indicating the size and shape of odd-regular shapes and then actually picking up those shapes. Results from the original work with D.F. was compared against the results from these new healthy controls.

Himmelbach and his colleagues don't dispute that D.F.'s performance was far more impaired for recognition tasks compared with the reaching and grasping tasks. However, compared against their new control data, they say it's clear that D.F. was also severely impaired in her reaching and grasping performance, seemingly undermining the neat interpretation that she had a preserved dorsal stream. The German group also point to more recent tests of D.F. showing that she has obvious motor deficits when the task is more complicated - for example, she was unable to grasp a disc through three holes in its surface using her thumb, index and middle fingers.

Other evidence highlighted by Himmelbach and co concerns a more recently identified patient "J.S." who has a similar pattern of brain damage to D.F. and who is more impaired on recognition than motor tasks, but who nonetheless is clearly severely impaired on motor tasks compared with healthy controls. Based on a scan of J.S., the researchers also doubt that the pattern of brain damage suffered by D.F is as circumscribed as previously claimed. Finally, the researchers are critical of the lack of "kinematic data" from the original tests of D.F. - things like reaction times, peak velocity of movements and so forth. Such data, they say, would show whether her movements were really normal, or if she were, for example, taking longer than normal to compensate for her difficulties.

"In conclusion," the researchers said, "the behaviour and anatomy of D.F. on its own does not provide firm grounds for the perception vs. action interpretation of dorsal and ventral stream areas." They added that other sources of support for the dual stream model "do not provide unequivocal evidence in favour of or against [the model] without reference to D.F. and could also be integrated by alternative models that do not explicitly state an action-perception dissociation."
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Himmelbach, M., Boehme, R. and Karnath, H. (2012). 20 years later: A second look on DF's motor behaviour. Neuropsychologia, 50 (1), 139-144 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.011

Further reading: One brain two visual systems.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When depressed mothers give birth to thriving babies

Shelves of evidence show the long-term, adverse consequences for an embryo of having a mother who is stressed or malnourished during pregnancy. For instance, there's medical data showing that underweight newborn babies are more at risk of heart diseases and other illnesses in adulthood.

According to the "thrifty phenotype" hypothesis, this is because the child is born with a body that's primed for malnutrition. When the baby instead encounters plentiful resources, its metabolism suffers as a result, leading to a long-term increased risk of stroke, heart disease and diabetes.

But what if the prenatal environment were a reliable predictor of the world that's to come? A surprising new study shows that adverse prenatal circumstances, in the form of having a depressed mother, are actually beneficial if that same context endures after birth. The finding is consistent with the "predictive-adaptive response model", which says that adversity in-utero can have adaptive advantages if adversity is also encountered after birth.

Curt Sandman and his team measured the depression levels of 221 healthy women during their pregnancy and for twelve months after their children were born. The babies were subsequently categorised into four groups. There were two "concordant" groups, for whom the environment was the same prenatally and post-natally, as in their mother was either depression-free in both phases or she had depression in both phases. And there were two "discrepant" groups, for whom the prenatal and postnatal environments were different, as in their mother had depression in one phase but not the other.

Here's the take-home finding: babies in the concordant groups exhibited superior scores on mental development at 3 and 6 months of age, and superior psychomotor development at 6 months, compared with the discrepant babies. Crucially, this was the case for both concordant groups. In other words, for babies whose mothers were depressed postnatally, it was those whose mothers were also depressed during pregnancy who fared better. This counterintuitive finding appears to contradict the received wisdom that adversity during pregnancy is only ever associated with adverse outcomes.

Zeroing in on the timings, it was specifically the consistency or not between a mother's depression state at 25 weeks' gestation and her depression state postnatally that had associations with the babies' developmental outcomes. This makes sense because past research has found mothers' depression at 25 weeks' gestation (as opposed to at other times) to be most strongly related with their emotional state postnatally. The researchers said it's as if the unborn child is "most sensitive to maternal signals of adversity when those signals are the most predictive of future outcomes."
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  Sandman, C., Davis, E., and Glynn, L. (2012). Prescient Human Fetuses Thrive. Psychological Science, 23 (1), 93-100 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611422073

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Having superior working memory capacity can make time go faster

Working memory is like a neural memo-pad. People with higher working memory capacity can hold more items in mind whilst solving a concurrent problem or performing a distracting task. There's been some excitement lately about the possibility that working memory can be improved through training, with knock-on benefits for IQ and academic attainment. A new study suggests such training should come with a footnote: "Improving your working memory could affect your perception of time".

James Woehrle and Joseph Magliano divided 99 students into two groups according to whether they had high or low working memory capacity. Next, the students solved subtraction problems in their heads. They were told the maths was their primary task but an extra challenge was to solve the problems for a certain duration, as judged by their own internal sense of time: either two minutes or four minutes.

The intriguing finding is that time went faster for the students with higher working memory capacity. When tasked with doing the maths for four minutes, they tended to work for longer, estimating that the time was up later than the low working memory participants.

What was going on? Why should having more working memory speed up the passage of time? Woehrle and Magliano said the finding was consistent with a popular account of time estimation, which posits that pulses are released by an internal pacemaker and accumulate in a counter. More pulses in the counter suggests more time has passed. Crucially, this process is gated by attention. When we pay attention to time, each pulse makes it into the counter and the passage of time feels slower. By contrast, if our attention is focused elsewhere, fewer pulses make it into the counter, as if less time has passed than really has (i.e. giving the subjective feeling of time having flown).

According to Woehrle and Magliano's Working Memory Capacity Hypothesis - the students in the current study with more working memory were able to allocate their attention almost entirely on the primary maths task. This benefited their maths performance but meant they were less vigilant of pulses accumulating in their internal clock. By contrast, the low working memory students couldn't help but allocate some attention to the secondary time-keeping task, making them more aware of the passage of time. As a consequence the low working memory students' time perception was actually more accurate but their maths performance suffered. The researchers said this evidence could have "profound implications in academic situations ... low working memory students may 'think' too much about how much time they put into their school work."

The new findings complement previous research showing that greater working memory capacity is associated with more accurate time perception, when time perception is the primary task. In this case, having more working memory allows for greater vigilance of the internal pacemaker and counter. Indeed, in the current study, the time perception of the higher working memory group was superior in a control condition in which they only had to estimate the passage of time.

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Woehrle, J., and Magliano, J. (2012). Time flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity. Acta Psychologica, 139 (2), 314-319 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.12.006

Previously on the Digest: Doubt cast on the maxim that time goes faster as you get older.
The surprising links between anger and time perception

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.