Category: Perception

Language, Perception, Personality

How People Judge Your Personality Based On Your Name

Blue Collar,Name Tags,Tags,badges,identificarion,workers,employment,By Matthew Warren

Extraversion, thy name is Katie. And Jack. And Carter. But not, it turns out, Joanna, Owen, or Lauren: these individuals instead embody different traits, like emotionality and agreeableness.

At least, that’s how people rated the personalities of those names in a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. According to the study, we associate the sounds in names with certain traits: names containing k and t sounds are judged as having quite different profiles than those with the more resonant n or l sounds. It will come as no surprise, however, that in the real world Katies are not actually any more likely to be extraverted than Laurens. Continue reading “How People Judge Your Personality Based On Your Name” →

Aesthetics, Perception

Here’s Why Spiky Shapes Seem Angry And Round Sounds Are Calming

By Emma Young

Picture yourself sitting in a Zen garden, surrounded by low, rounded bushes and gravel raked into rippling swirls. Now imagine standing in front of a brutalist building, all straight lines and sharp edges. If you think you’d feel more relaxed in the Zen garden, there could be a low-level perceptual reason — one that could explain everything from why you’re far more likely to find a jagged script on the cover of a death metal album than on a romance novel, to why clouds and lullabies seem to go together.

The new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that we automatically associate variations in one particular property of images or sounds with variations in levels of emotional arousal. This gives us an instinctive understanding, just from the tone of someone’s voice or watching their movements, of whether they are angry or sad, excited or calm. But it seems that these associations between perception and emotion are so automatic and fundamental that we apply them to inanimate objects, as well.

Continue reading “Here’s Why Spiky Shapes Seem Angry And Round Sounds Are Calming” →

Developmental, Faces, Perception

How A Mother’s Odour Helps Her Baby Develop A Sensitivity To Faces

GettyImages-926657584.jpgBy Emma Young

A newborn baby knows almost nothing about the world it comes into. To make sense of the onslaught of incoming sensory information, she or he must start to notice meaningful patterns and categorise them: that particular combination of visual data signifies a “face”, for example, while that noise is a “voice”. As the authors of a new paper in Developmental Science point out, “without this fundamental categorisation function, our nervous systems would be overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of our experience.” 

It had been thought that infants form these categories using information from just one sense, whichever is the most relevant. Following this account, the category of “faces” results from an accumulation of visual information about what faces look like. However, an intriguing new study, involving four-month-old infants and their mothers’ smelly t-shirts, suggests that babies’ early acquisition of the faces category is a truly multi-sensory process. 

Continue reading “How A Mother’s Odour Helps Her Baby Develop A Sensitivity To Faces” →

Aesthetics, Perception

Even People Without Mathematical Training Experience The “Beauty” Of Maths

GettyImages-655281658.jpgBy Matthew Warren

Philosophers and mathematicians have long held that maths can be aesthetically pleasing. “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty,” wrote Bertrand Russell, while Carl Friedrich Gauss proclaimed that “The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal themselves in all their beauty only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it”.

But a study published recently in Cognition suggests that even those whose lives don’t revolve around logic and numbers also have an appreciation for mathematical “beauty”. People tend to see similarities between mathematical proofs and certain paintings or pieces of music, the study finds, suggesting we all share an intuition for the aesthetics of mathematics.

Continue reading “Even People Without Mathematical Training Experience The “Beauty” Of Maths” →

Brain, Perception, Time

Your Brain Stops Time When You Blink

giphy-1By Emma Young

You spend about 10 per cent of your waking hours with your eyes shut, simply because of blinking. Every few seconds, each time you blink, your retinas are deprived of visual input for a period lasting anywhere between tens to hundreds of milliseconds (500 milliseconds is equivalent to half a second). You don’t usually notice this because your brain suppresses the dark spells and stitches together the bursts of visual information seamlessly. But these dips in visual processing in the brain do have an impact: a new study in Psychological Science finds that, in an important way, they cause your sense of the passing of time to stop temporarily. 

Continue reading “Your Brain Stops Time When You Blink” →

Cognition, Perception, Sleep and dreaming

The Ninja Brain: Humans Can Prioritise Meaningful Sounds Even While Asleep

GettyImages-532592009.jpgBy Matthew Warren

We often think of sleep as a chance to switch off from the outside world, leaving us blissfully ignorant of anything going on around us. But neuroscience research has shown this is a fantasy – we still monitor the environment and respond to particular sounds while we’re sleeping (at least in some stages of sleep) – a fact that will be unsurprising to anyone who has woken up after hearing someone say their name.

Now a study published in Nature Human Behaviour has revealed more about the brain’s surprisingly sophisticated levels of engagement with the outside world during sleep. Not only does the sleeping brain respond to certain words or sounds – it can even select between competing signals, prioritising the one that is more informative.

Continue reading “The Ninja Brain: Humans Can Prioritise Meaningful Sounds Even While Asleep” →

Perception

Researchers Show There Is A Simple Way To Induce Synesthesia In People With Normal Perception

GettyImages-182147248.jpgBy Christian Jarrett

For most of us, it is difficult to imagine what it must be like to be a synesthete – that is, someone who experiences a crossing over of their senses, such as seeing sounds as colours, or perceiving shapes as having tastes. However, according to a new study in Consciousness and Cognition, it is actually relatively easy for people with normal perception to have a synesthetic experience (of the sound-to-vision variety). It merely takes a few minutes of visual deprivation, followed by a visual imagery task. The findings are not merely intriguing – and a fun idea for a psychology class experiment – they also have a bearing on the main theories for how synesthesia occurs.

Continue reading “Researchers Show There Is A Simple Way To Induce Synesthesia In People With Normal Perception” →

Brain, Language, Perception, Thought

How Do Blind People Who’ve Never Seen Colour, Think About Colour?

GettyImages-812520774.jpgBy Emma Young

Think about the concepts of “red” and “justice” and you’ll notice a key difference. If you’re sighted, you’ll associate “red” most strongly with the sensory experience, which relates to signals from cone cells in your eyes. “Justice”, in contrast, doesn’t have any associated sensory qualities – as an abstract concept, you’ll think about its meaning, which you learnt via language, understanding it to be related to other abstract concepts like “fairness” or “accountability”, perhaps. But what about blind people – how do they think about “red”? 

 A brain-imaging study of 12 people who had been blind from birth, and 14 sighted people, published recently in Nature Communications, shows that while for sighted people, sensory and abstract concepts like “red” and “justice” are represented in different brain regions, for blind people, they’re represented in the same “abstract concept” region. 

Continue reading “How Do Blind People Who’ve Never Seen Colour, Think About Colour?” →

Faces, Perception, Social

Here’s A Simple Trick For Anyone Who Finds Eye Contact Too Intense

GettyImages-157522456.jpgBy Christian Jarrett

We’re taught from an early age that it is polite and assertive to look people in the eyes when we’re talking to them. Psychology research backs this up – people who make plenty of eye contact – as long as it’s not excessive – are usually perceived as more competent, trustworthy and intelligent. If you want to make a good impression, then, it’s probably a good idea to meet the gaze of the person you’re talking to. However, following this advice is not necessarily straight-forward for everyone. It’s well-documented that mutual gaze can be emotionally intense and distracting, even uncomfortably so for some.

If this is your experience, you may welcome a study published recently in the journal Perception that documents a phenomenon known as the “eye contact illusion” – put simply, we are not that good at telling whether an interlocutor is looking us in the eye or not. In fact, we tend to think they are, even when they’re not (a bias that is magnified after we’ve been rejected). Thanks to this illusion, you can give the impression of making eye contact simply by ensuring you are looking in the general direction of your conversant’s face.

Continue reading “Here’s A Simple Trick For Anyone Who Finds Eye Contact Too Intense” →

Perception

First Study Of Its Kind Finds Healthy People Have A Distorted Sense Of Their Body Volume And Length
Screenshot 2019-02-05 at 16.57.33.png
via Sadibolova et al, 2019

By Christian Jarrett

How accurately or not we are able to judge the size of our own bodies and specific body parts is an important topic in clinical psychology because a distorted body image is thought to play part in eating disorders, body dysmorphia and other related conditions. However, research has until now been limited in always involving one- or two-dimensional judgments, with volunteers asked to estimated the length of various body parts, for instance, or asked to judge which of various 2-dimensional visual depictions of their body is most accurate. In reality, of course, we don’t just have a sense of how our body looks in two dimensions from the outside but also how it feels from the inside, including how much space it occupies.

A new study published in Cortex is the first to examine how accurately people of healthy weight can estimate the volume of their entire body and specific body parts. Renata Sadibolova at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her colleagues write that “these findings … highlight the importance of studying the perceptual distortions ‘at the baseline’, i.e., in healthy population, given their potential to further elucidate the nature of perceptual distortions in clinical conditions.”

Continue reading “First Study Of Its Kind Finds Healthy People Have A Distorted Sense Of Their Body Volume And Length” →