This popular illusion created by Nobuyuki Kayahara in 2003, shows the spinning silhouette of a female dancer. If the viewer’s perception is that the foot touching the floor is the left foot, then the dancer appears to be spinning in a clockwise direction. If the foot touching the floor is perceived to be the right foot, then the dancer seems to be spinning in a counterclockwise direction. Continue reading
Stereotype threat describes the experience of “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype of one’s group” (Steel & Aronson, 1995). Continue reading
So, everyone has heard the results of the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. After a panel of men and women reviewed the captions, their findings deemed men were funnier by the merest of a fraction of a percent. However, men think men are funnier; men like men’s humor better; men like sexist jokes; men try harder and there is a huge stereotypical image in the general population of men being the funnier sex. Continue reading
Advertising is intrinsically linked to the science of psychology. In this short video Dr. Robert Cialdini discusses various psychological techniques employed by advertisers in order to influence consumer thinking and boost product sales. Among the strategies discussed are the principles of reciprocation, scarcity, authority, commitment, liking and consensus.
Look carefully…there’s something pretty special about the images above. What’s so great about four upside-down faces you ask? See for yourself. Below we have the same images when positioned right-side-up: Continue reading
In the video above Jonathan Grainger discusses an experiment in which he and his colleagues attempted to teach Guinea baboons to distinguish between real English words and strings of letters which are not English words. The baboons learned to recognize words from nonwords, exhibiting human-like orthographic processing. The results indicate that the baboons were focusing on the location of individual letters in the words in order to identify them. Interestingly, this is similar to the approach taken by human readers.
