Rachel Helps

By Emma Young

While some of us crumble in the face of adversity, and struggle to recover, others quickly bounce back from even serious trauma. Psychological resilience is undeniably important in all kinds of areas of life, so understanding what underpins it, and how to train it – particularly in children — is of intense interest to psychologists.

1. Watch your language

According to Carol Dweck of growth mindset fame, to drive success in our children we should “praise the effort that led to the outcome or learning progress; tie the praise to it,” as opposed to praising effort more broadly, or achievement alone. Research led by Victoria Sisk and published in Psychological Science last year did challenge the idea that encouraging children to have a growth mindset (to believe that effort affects attributes like intelligence) increases academic achievement. However, there are certainly studies finding that focusing on a child’s actions, rather than who they “are”, helps them to withstand setbacks. As Emily Foster-Hanson and her fellow researchers at New York University note in a study also published last year, in Child Development: “Setbacks and difficulties are common features of children’s experience throughout development and into adulthood,” so it’s important to examine the effects of category labelling — like “being smart” or “being a helper”.

The team’s study of four- and five-year-old visitors to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan found that setbacks were more detrimental to a child labelled “a helper” than a child asked “to help”. Children asked “to help” with tasks in which they were set up to fail (by being asked to put away a toy truck that fell apart as soon as they picked it up, for example) were more likely to go on to volunteer to help with other demanding situations. In contrast, the “helper” kids tended to avoid these and opt instead for low-effort tasks with a high chance of success, like putting away some crayons. Perhaps these kids were taking advantage of a quick, virtually-guaranteed way to restore a little of their dented “helper” image — one they weren’t about to risk even further by going for a challenging task. So, if you do want your kids to weather inevitable setbacks, resist asking them to “be” anything, like “my helper”.

2. Engage in “strength-based parenting”

“Strength-based parenting” entails deliberately identifying and cultivating positive states, processes and qualities in a child, explains Lea Waters at the University of Melbourne, Australia. “This style of parenting adds a ‘positive filter’ to the way a child reacts to stress. It also limits the likelihood of children using avoidance or aggressive coping responses,” she says.

In 2015, Waters and her colleagues published a preliminary study in the journal Psychology that explored strength-based coping in a group of Australian primary school-age children. The team presented the kids with a few theoretical stressful scenarios — falling out with a friend over turns on a swing, and being the only one in class who hadn’t done a homework project that was due in the next day — and asked them to describe how they would respond. The children who came up with “positive” responses (like taking deep breaths to help them to cope with the homework challenge, and reminding themselves of happy times with the friend, or “using their kindness” and deciding to let the other child have more turns on the swing), and who indicated that their parents were aware of their strengths, and encouraged them to use them, also experienced less stress themselves.

In 2017, Waters and her team reported that training in strength-based parenting could help parents, too. Parents who were taught how to identify and cultivate strengths in themselves and their children went on to feel more positively about their children and reported greater confidence in their ability to raise them successfully. Then in 2019, the team reported a link between strength-based coping and enhanced academic perseverance in adolescents. This work suggests that a “strength-based” approach may help with resilience to setbacks at school.

To try a strength-based approach with a child, the team recommends consciously identifying and fostering their abilities, talents and skills, and encouraging them to use them when faced with difficulties.

3. Don’t shield them from stress

Dennis Charney, a biological psychiatrist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai, New York, has studied all kinds of people who’ve been through traumatic experiences — from being a prisoner of war to suffering assault, or natural disaster — and identified factors that explain why some people bounce back, while others don’t. (His 2012 book, Resilience, jointly-authored with Steven Southwick at Yale University, explains the findings in full. There’s also a podcast based on the book.)

Being the kind of person who embraces tough challenges, rather than trying to avoid them, emerged as a key factor. To develop this, Charney recommends giving kids challenges that they can just about manage, and once they have achieved them, raising the bar a little each time. With his own five kids, he’d take them on long hikes, for instance, and get them just a little lost. During one of these trips, he recalls, one of his daughters told him that “out of her soul, she despised me”. (Now an adult, she willingly goes off hiking herself). Exposing kids to controlled stressful experiences allows them to develop a “psychological toolkit” of coping methods to draw upon in adulthood too, Charney maintains.

4. Teach self-regulation skills

Explicitly teaching kids ways to regulate their responses to adversity builds resilience, helping them to do well in school and in life. This is the message from a 2017 study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, of 365 Spanish children and young adults, aged 15-21, all of whom struggled academically.

In research conducted for her 2014 PhD thesis, Raquel Artuch-Garde at the International University of La Rioja found that self-regulation and resilience are key factors that can determine academic success or failure. For the more recent study, she and her colleagues gave the participants a resilience scale (which asked about their perceptions of support and their ability to tolerate negative situations) and a self-regulation questionnaire (which explored their ability to make and stick to goals and to persevere at a task). They found a clear relationship between scores on both. Participants who were better able to learn from mistakes — which was considered to be a crucial aspect of self-regulation — had a greater tolerance for negative situations; in other words, they demonstrated greater resilience.

Self-regulation involves analysing and setting specific task-related goals, monitoring and evaluating your performance, managing your emotions throughout, and learning from whatever went wrong. The recent study suggests that teaching children these kinds of skills could help with resilience, too. “The research shows the relationship between two essential non-cognitive skills: resilience and self-regulation, that are equally or even more important than cognitive aspects in the educational process of students at risk of social exclusion,” Artuch-Garde says.

5. Focus on “quantity time” and group activities

In 1998, Iceland launched a national initiative with the aim of slashing alcohol and drug use among teens. But the way the programme was set up meant that it did not only this, but much more.

Through funded sport, art and music classes, teenagers were given alternative ways to feel good. Among new measures targeted at adults, parents were encouraged to spend more time with their kids (not just limited “quality time”) and to talk more to their children about their lives.

National questionnaires showed a huge adoption of both these strategies between 1997 and 2012 — and during the same period, Iceland went from having some of the worst statistics for teen alcohol and drug use in Europe to having the best. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” commented US-based consultant Harvey Milkman, in 2017. “I’m just so impressed by how well it is working.”

Towns and municipalities in many other countries have now adopted the model, and in 2019, Chile announced that it would roll out its own version of the Icelandic programme nationally.

The Icelandic initiative was not set up to “train resilience”, but in bringing families closer together and increasing access to sport and cultural activities, it is producing physically and psychologically healthier teenagers — kids who find it easier to resist drugs, and who should be better equipped to cope with challenges in their lives.

It couldn’t have happened, however, without the full backing of the government, local mayors, other public officials and schools. In other communities that are adopting the model, and that are seeing the benefits, local mayors and policy-makers have either instigated or come on board to drive similar programmes within their community. An individualistic focus on improving self-regulation, for example, in your own kids is one thing. But when everyone gets together to support all the teens within a community, or a country, the results can be remarkable.

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

The Psychologist has a collection of archive resources on resilence, including a new British Psychological Society briefing paper on the topic.

By Tom Stafford, University of Sheffield

The headlines

The Australian: Male and female brains still unequal

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: Gender disparities in cognition will not diminish

The Economist: A variation in the cognitive abilities of the two sexes may be more about social development than gender stereotypes

The story

Everybody has an opinion on men, women and the difference (or not) between them. Now a new study has used a massive and long-running European survey to investigate how differences in cognitive ability are changing. This is super smart, because it offers us an escape from arguing about whether men and women are different in how they think, allowing us some insight into how any such differences might develop.

What they actually did

Researchers led by Daniela Weber at Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis analysed data collected as part of the European Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement. This includes data analysed in this study from approximately 31,000 adults, men and women all aged older than 50. As well as answering demographic questions, the survey participants took short quizzes which tested their memory, numeracy and verbal fluency (this last item involved a classic test which asks people to name as many animals as they could in 60 seconds). Alongside each test score, we have the year the participant was born in, as well as measures of gender equality and economic development for the country where they grew up.

What they found

The results show that as a country develops economically, the differences in cognitive ability between men and women change. But the pattern isn’t straightforward. Differences in verbal fluency disappear (so that an advantage on this test for men born in the 1920s over women is not found for those born in the 1950s). Differences in numeracy diminish (so the male advantage is less) and differences in memory actually increase (so that a female advantage is accentuated).

Further analysis looked at the how these differences in cognitive performance related to the amount of education men and women got. In all regions women tended to have fewer years of education, on average, then men. But, importantly, the size of this difference varied. This allowed the researchers to gauge how differences in education affected cognitive performance.

For all three abilities tested, there was a relationship between the size of the differences in the amount of education and the size of the difference in cognitive performance: fewer years of education for women was associated with worse scores for women, as you’d expect.

What varied for the three abilities was in the researchers’ predictions for the situation where men and women spent an equal amount of time in education: for memory this scenario was associated with a distinct female advantage, for numeracy a male advantage and for verbal fluency, there was no difference.

What this means

The thing that dogs studies on gender differences in cognition is the question of why these differences exist. People have such strong expectations, that they often leap to the assumption that any observed difference must reflect something fundamental about men vs women. Here, consider the example of the Australian newspaper which headlined their take on this story as telling us something about “male and female brains”, the implication being that the unequalness was a fundamental, biological, difference. In fact, research often shows that gender differences in cognitive performance are small, and even then we don’t know why these differences exist.

The great thing about this study is that by looking at how gender differences evolve over time it promises insight into what drives those difference in the first place. The fact that the female memory advantage increases as women are allowed more access to education is, on the face of it, suggestive evidence that at least one cognitive difference between men and women may be unleashed by more equal societies, rather than removed by them.

Tom’s take

The most important thing to take from this research is – as the authors report – increasing gender equality disproportionately benefits women. This is because – no surprise! – gender inequality disproportionately disadvantages women. Even in the area of cognitive performance, this historical denial of opportunities, health and education to women means, at a population level, they have more potential to increase their scores on these tests.

Along with other research on things like IQ, this study found systemmatic improvements in cognitive performance across time for both men and women – as everyone’s opportunities and health increases, so does their cognitive function.

But the provocative suggestion of this study is that as societies develop we won’t necessarily see all gender differences go away. Some cognitive differences may actually increase when women are at less of a disadvantage.

You don’t leap to conclusions based on one study, but this is a neat contribution. One caveat is that even though indices such as “years in education” show diminished gender inequality in Europe, you’d be a fool to think that societies which educated men and women for an equal number of years treated them both equally and put equal expectations on them.

Even if you thought this was true for 2014, you wouldn’t think this was true for European societies of the 1950s (when the youngest of these study participants were growing up). There could be very strong societal influences on cognitive ability – such as expecting women to be good with words and bad with numbers – that simply aren’t captured by the data analysed here.

Personally, I find it interesting to observe how keen people are to seize on such evidence that “essential” gender differences definitely do exist (despite the known confounds of living in a sexist society). My preferred strategy would be to hold judgement and focus on the remaking the definitely sexist society. For certain, we’ll only get the truth when we have an account of how cognitive abilities develop within both biological and social contexts. Studies like this point the way, and suggest that whatever the truth is, it should have some surprises for everyone.

Read more

The original research: The changing face of cognitive gender differences in Europe

My previous column on gender differences: Are men better wired to read maps or is it a tired cliché?

Cordelia Fine’s book, Delusions of gender: how our minds, society, and neuro-sexism create difference

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Yesterday I made a game called Leaderboarder using a tool (well, something, I don’t have the technical knowhow to know what you call these things) called Meteor. Basically I took some example code for a live-updating leaderboard and changed it so that anyone could update anyone else’s score, one point at a time, by clicking a plus or minus button. And I also added the ability to add yourself to the leaderboard by typing in your name and submitting that. The whole thing was pretty painless to make, kind of enjoyable, and yielded pretty much exactly what I’d been thinking about.

So then I let people know it existed and then fooled around having click wars with different people to be at the top of the leaderboard. The game in it’s “pure” form felt pretty interesting in the ways I’d hoped: it was still weirdly engaging to click the buttons and try to win, it felt meaningful that you were “fighting” for a name you selected, and it incorporated the idea of helping or hindering other people, too. Lots of agency and meaning at very little implementation cost. So I would have been entirely happy if it had wound up there.

But it didn’t. Because I posted it on Reddit.

I went off to have dinner and live my life, and when I came back things were a little different to the naive world of honest toil and competition I’d thought I was setting in motion. Now you could watch as scores rocketed upwards at insane speeds. (I’d been happy when I could get a really impressive tapping rhythm going on my trackpad to overtake other people on the leaderboard.) Autoclickers had arrived in the world, and they were way, way better at the game than anyone before them.

Then at some point things went much, much crazier, because people started hacking the game and writing scripts to interface directly with the underlying code. The game is just written in (very unprotected) JavaScript, so it’s not so hard to read the source, work out what the available database commands are and then to insert pretty much anything you want or increment any score as often as you want, etc. And people wanted to. And they did. So the leaderboard became this freaky tumult of names that were longer than the character “limit”, scores that were floating point numbers instead of integers, scores that were words, and on and on.

Later on people pretty clearly started writing bots of some kind that were monitoring the leaderboard and making changes according to different kinds of events. Some were cycling random patterns through the scores. Some were reseting everyone on the leaderboard (except a chosen few I suppose) to negative scores. Some were reactive and would lower the score of anyone who came into competition with their representation on the board. It was (and still is) a madhouse.

By the time I got up this morning and looked at Leaderboarder it was like this amazing post-apocalyptic wasteland where only the vicious survived. I found my name (near the bottom) and started manually climbing through the detritus of this mostly destroyed world. As I clicked up my score I passed people’s jokes, their statements of hubris, their Hitler references, their ASCII penises, and more. It was all very Ozymandius. It was also remarkably aesthetically similar to walking around in Fallout 3. Surrounded by vestiges of a destroyed history, trying to make progress through the world, feeling somehow endangered.

As I neared the top I paused briefly. Things had been relatively quiet on the way up and I’d more or less assumed the world was dead, with me as it’s creator and final observer. But no, a player called “RickMoranis” climbed up to join me and then moved past, all at a speed suggesting it wasn’t human. Then, as RickMoranis approached the score of someone (or something) called Kuxir “his” score suddenly started to nosedive, as though “he” had run into a forcefield. RickMoranis kept trying valiantly but eventually seemed to give up, defeated. Kuxir sat there, impassive.

I decided to just stop where I was. Above me, positions #1 and #2 had a sudden and savage battle with each other, flipping positions madly for several seconds before settling briefly in a tie, and then back into their previous ordering. Then my own score began randomly oscillating up and down. I quietly closed the tab, but that world didn’t go away, it was still in there.

This evening, the entire world is different again. John Stamos is in the top five. PI and floor(PI) are duking it out at the top. Soon everything will be different again, reshaped by forces I don’t understand. I love it.

O brave new world, that has such “people” in it.

Fear of Twine is an online exhibition of text-based games made by a highly diverse group of people from all around the world. It’s not just diverse in its list of authors, though: it has everything from fantasy to horror to science fiction to deeply personal explorations of kink to abstract political fiction about working-class politics. The site’s a little minimalistic, but the content is fantastically rich.

Fear of Twine features my new Lands of Dream game, The Matter of the Great Red Dragon. I know I’m supposed to be either insincerely humble or ridiculously boastful for the purposes of marketing, but the truth is that I’m just really happy that I got to make this game. It turned out exactly as I wanted it to and thinking about it gives me the warm, fuzzy feeling of having met some old friends and found that we still get along. So there you go. I hope you enjoy it.

Fear of Twine also includes Verena’s first solo game, Zombies and Elephants. Personally, I think it’s pretty awesome, with a lot more layers to it than the title might suggest (as is true of a lot of pulp fiction), but then again I may be biased. (I’m not. I’m a very harsh critic.) I know there are still a couple of things that Verena would like to change, but you know what they say about art. It’s full of the undead.

There’s a lot more to Fear of Twine, though I can’t figure out how to start another sentence with it. I haven’t played all the games yet, but I should definitely mention Abstract State-warp Machines by my dear friend and accomplished, original poet Ivaylo Shmilev. Interactive science fiction poetry! You’re in for a challenge and a treat. (And then there’s Workers in Progress by Konstantinos Dimopoulos and Truth is Ghost by Joel Goodwin and and and…)

I hope this exhibition will gain some traction with the press. I don’t think there’s ever been anything quite like it, and it deserves some attention.

(The site was recently updated, by the way, and is now more accessible.)

I remember, aged five or so, a friend and I were the cool police motorcyclists from the TV show CHiPs. Our props were limited to the usual paraphernalia of a suburban home and yet somehow both of us knew when the other person was on foot or on his Kawasaki motorbike, which routes through the house were motorways, where the baddies were located, and most important, we both understood the plot of our game.

For a new study, a team of psychologists in Australia has taken an interest in the conversation that allows this kind of coordinated imaginary game-play between childhood friends. Frances Hoyte and her colleagues video recorded three boys aged five to six - Alan, Bradley, and Max - as they played with each other in pairs for half an hour. Alan and Bradley had previously identified each other as being "very best friends", as had Bradley and Max. Alan and Max were "just a little bit friends."

Each pairing from this trio was asked to play together with various props available to help them on their way, including brightly coloured building blocks, wooden discs, bottle tops and pebbles. The toys were chosen deliberately to be open-ended, "so that the materials did not prescribe a specific agenda for play."

Hoyte's team identified three conversational themes in the boys' playtime interactions. The first, found in the conversations in all three pairs, the researchers called "making together". "The goal of the first talk type," the researchers said, "was to co-construct a representation of some real or imaginary object."

The second kind of talk - "sharing personal information" - was only found between the pairs of boys who were best friends. The final talk type - "storytelling" - was also found only between best friends and involved the boys bringing a fictional scenario to life. In one, Alan and Bradley blasted off into space together in a rocket. Sometimes events are described in the third person, other times the children assume the character roles themselves:

Bradley: They breathe out fire out their um shoes
Alan: There we go (noise effects)
Bradley: And then off they go
Bradley: They keep on burning their feet
Alan: Yeah
Bradley: And they don't say "ow"

Another story these boys concocted together appeared to involve shooting their entire family. The researchers chose not to dwell on the disturbing content of this particular game and focused instead on the common features of joint imaginary play, including: negotiation, sharing of power and control, and frequent use of declaratives and imperatives, and mental process verbs such as "think," "know" and "say". The researchers observed that: "The children also share a sense of what would be exciting, or appealing to imagine. Possibly, this shared outlook or view of the world underpins their narrative construction and allows them to successfully create the story together."

Hoyte and her colleagues admitted they really need to study more children and to follow patterns of changing play conversation over time. This way they'll be able to discover how friendship levels and play influence each other, and also whether joint imaginary play has consequences for language development.

_________________________________

Frances Hoyte, Jane Torr, and Sheila Degotardi (2013). The language of friendship: Genre in the conversations of preschool children Journal of Early Childhood Research DOI: 10.1177/1476718X13492941

--Further reading--
Kids with invisible friends have superior narrative skills
Fantasy-prone children struggle to apply lessons from fantasy stories
Background TV disrupts children's play

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

After Aaron Alexis shot dead 12 people at the Navy Yard in Washington DC in September, media outlets were quick to highlight his reported enjoyment of violent video games. To many, this was just the latest example of how violent games can foster real-life aggression. There is research supporting such a link, although experts are far from reaching a consensus view on the matter. Take, for example, the letter written in September by a group of 230 scholars, calling for the American Psychological Association to adopt a more nuanced position on the nature of the evidence.

A refrain from many sceptical researchers in this field is that the situation is complex. To claim baldly that violent video games cause real-life aggression is an oversimplification, they say. Now a brief but elegant new study has done a useful job highlighting some of these intricacies.

Christian Happ and his colleagues recruited 60 students (20 men) with varied video gaming experience and had them spend 15 minutes playing the violent and bloody beat-em-up game Mortal Combat vs. DC Universe on the Playstation 3. Some of the participants played the morally good character Superman, while the others played the Joker, the baddie from Batman. Apart from that, the game experience was the same for all participants - their time was spent in hand-to-hand combat against a variety of other computer-controlled game characters.

Another twist to the experiment was that before the game began half the participants read a bogus Wikipedia article about their character, designed to encourage them to empathise with him. For those playing Superman, the article said how he'd come from a loving family. The Joker article described how he'd suffered abuse in his childhood.

After playing the video game, the participants looked at grids of faces on a computer screen and indicated how hostile they looked. Some of the grids contained angry faces, but the crucial test was how hostile the participants rated the grids that contained all neutral faces. The key finding here was that participants who'd played the Joker were more likely to perceive hostility in neutral faces (a marker of an aggressive mindset), as compared with the participants who played Superman.

Another test was an old favourite known as the "lost letter technique". As the students left the lab, they saw a stamped and addressed envelope on the floor outside. Those who'd played Superman in the violent game were 6.2 times more likely to post the letter or hand it in to the researchers, as compared with those who played The Joker (the rates were 20.7 per cent vs. 3.3 per cent, respectively).

These results show that the effects of playing a violent game aren't straight-forward. Apart from anything else, the effects clearly depend on the moral nature of the fictional character that players embody. Note though, that we can't say that playing as Superman actually boosted levels of prosocial behaviour because it's possible rates of returning the letter were still lower for these students than they would have been had they not played the video game at all. It's a shame there wasn't a baseline control condition to shed light on this.

That the influence of this violent game varies according to the character played was made even more apparent by the back stories, which were designed to encourage empathy towards the characters. For those students who played as Superman and read about his childhood, their perception of hostility in neutral faces was lower than for those who didn't read this detail. By contrast, students who played the Joker and who read about his upbringing were more likely to see hostility in neutral faces, as compared with those who didn't read about his past.  In other words, the effect of the violent game differed according to the character the students played, and this difference was amplified when they were encouraged to empathise with their character.

"As media violence is suspected to lead to a violent and desensitised personality in the long run, a closer analysis of the presentation and choice of video game characters becomes increasingly important," the researchers said. "Future research should not only study the violent content of games, but also the role empathy, its mechanisms, and how it may be used to induce positive and long-lasting behavioural effects that might even lead to beneficial changes in personality."

_________________________________

Happ C, Melzer A, and Steffgen G (2013). Superman vs. BAD Man? The Effects of Empathy and Game Character in Violent Video Games. Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking, 16 (10), 774-8 PMID: 23745616

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

i did a variant cover for an issue of garfield and now i can die happy

The ”Off-Ground“  project by Amsterdam-based designers Jair Straschnow and Gitte Nygaard seeks to scale up play elements so that they can be used as alternative public seating.  Their design asks ‘why are benches the only option for public space?’ and uses discarded firehoses within an innovative frame that allows you to adjust the ends of the seat for sitting, lounging or lying down…by forming a low seat, a swing or a hammock.   Brilliant!    See Off-Ground at the Danish Architecture Center in our-favorite-city-for-play, Copenhagen.

[via Gizmodo.  Thanks Eric!]

The post Swings and Hammocks for Public Spaces appeared first on Playscapes.

Most of us experience false alarms with phones, and as Tom Stafford explains this happens because it is a common and unavoidable part of healthy brain function.

Sensing phantom phone vibrations is a strangely common experience. Around 80% of us have imagined a phone vibrating in our pockets when it’s actually completely still. Almost 30% of us have also heard non-existent ringing. Are these hallucinations ominous signs of impending madness caused by digital culture?

Not at all. In fact, phantom vibrations and ringing illustrate a fundamental principle in psychology.

You are an example of a perceptual system, just like a fire alarm, an automatic door, or a daffodil bulb that must decide when spring has truly started. Your brain has to make a perceptual judgment about whether the phone in your pocket is really vibrating. And, analogous to a daffodil bulb on a warm February morning, it has to decide whether the incoming signals from the skin near your pocket indicate a true change in the world.

Psychologists use a concept called Signal Detection Theory to guide their thinking about the problem of perceptual judgments. Working though the example of phone vibrations, we can see how this theory explains why they are a common and unavoidable part of healthy mental function.

When your phone is in your pocket, the world is in one of two possible states: the phone is either ringing or not. You also have two possible states of mind: the judgment that the phone is ringing, or the judgment that it isn’t. Obviously you’d like to match these states in the correct way. True vibrations should go with “it’s ringing”, and no vibrations should go with “it’s not ringing”. Signal detection theory calls these faithful matches a “hit” and a “correct rejection”, respectively.

But there are two other possible combinations: you could mismatch true vibrations with “it’s not ringing” (a “miss”); or mismatch the absence of vibrations with “it’s ringing” (a “false alarm”). This second kind of mismatch is what’s going on when you imagine a phantom phone vibration.

For situations where easy judgments can be made, such as deciding if someone says your name in a quiet room, you will probably make perfect matches every time. But when judgments are more difficult – if you have to decide whether someone says your name in a noisy room, or have to evaluate something you’re not skilled at – mismatches will occasionally happen. And these mistakes will be either misses or false alarms.

Alarm ring

Signal detection theory tells us that there are two ways of changing the rate of mismatches. The best way is to alter your sensitivity to the thing you are trying to detect. This would mean setting your phone to a stronger vibration, or maybe placing your phone next to a more sensitive part of your body. (Don’t do both or people will look at you funny.) The second option is to shift your bias so that you are more or less likely to conclude “it’s ringing”, regardless of whether it really is.

Of course, there’s a trade-off to be made. If you don’t mind making more false alarms, you can avoid making so many misses. In other words, you can make sure that you always notice when your phone is ringing, but only at the cost of experiencing more phantom vibrations.

These two features of a perceiving system – sensitivity and bias – are always present and independent of each other. The more sensitive a system is the better, because it is more able to discriminate between true states of the world. But bias doesn’t have an obvious optimum. The appropriate level of bias depends on the relative costs and benefits of different matches and mismatches.

What does that mean in terms of your phone? We can assume that people like to notice when their phone is ringing, and that most people hate missing a call. This means their perceptual systems have adjusted their bias to a level that makes misses unlikely. The unavoidable cost is a raised likelihood of false alarms – of phantom phone vibrations. Sure enough, the same study that reported phantom phone vibrations among nearly 80% of the population also found that these types of mismatches were particularly common among people who scored highest on a novelty-seeking personality test. These people place the highest cost on missing an exciting call.

The trade-off between false alarms and misses also explains why we all have to put up with fire alarms going off when there isn’t a fire. It isn’t that the alarms are badly designed, but rather that they are very sensitive to smoke and heat – and biased to avoid missing a real fire at all costs. The outcome is a rise in the number of false alarms. These are inconvenient, but nowhere near as inconvenient as burning to death in your bed or office. The alarms are designed to err on the side of caution.

All perception is made up of information from the world and biases we have adjusted from experience. Feeling a phantom phone vibration isn’t some kind of pathological hallucination. It simply reflects our near-perfect perceptual systems trying their best in an uncertain and noisy world.

This article was originally published on BBC Future. The original is here.

bhagatkapil:

Science Day in India, posting whole series of Scientists, their inventions or discoveries.

Shop: http://society6.com/KapilBhagat

i love these, especially Einstein!

A significant milestone was passed last August when Amazon announced that sales of books on its Kindle e-reader platform outstripped print sales for the first time. There's no question that e-readers are convenient - you can load a single device with thousands of titles. But some commentators have started to question whether digital reading has adverse effects on memory and comprehension compared with reading from print.

In 2010, a reassuring study in fact found no difference in recall after reading material electronically versus paper. Now Sara Margolin and her colleagues have looked at reading comprehension and again found no deficits in understanding of material consumed on a Kindle or a computer versus paper.

Margolin's team invited 90 student participants (average age 19 years) to read ten short passages of text.  One third of them read on paper (A4 size, Times New Roman font), 30 of them read on a second gen. Kindle (6 inch screen), and the remainder read via a pdf reader on a computer monitor. Five of the passages were factual (biographies) and five were excerpts from literary fiction. After each passage, the students answered five to six multiple-choice comprehension questions. They could take as long as they wanted to read each passage, but there was no going back to the text once they started answering the questions.

Overall accuracy was at around 75 per cent and, crucially, there was no difference in comprehension performance across the three conditions. This was true whether reading factual or narrative passages of text. "From an educational and classroom perspective, these results are comforting," the researchers concluded. "While new technologies have sometimes been seen as disruptive, these results indicate that students' comprehension does not necessarily suffer, regardless of the format from which they read their text."

Unfortunately the study didn't look at the participants' familiarity with e-reader devices. It remains to be seen whether the same results would hold with an older sample and/or with readers who may be less experienced with digital devices. Also the text passages were only around 500 words long. Future research needs to examine comprehension for entire chapters and books. Devices like iPads, which are back-lit and have more potentially distracting functionality, also need to be tested.

_________________________________

Margolin, S., Driscoll, C., Toland, M., and Kegler, J. (2013). E-readers, Computer Screens, or Paper: Does Reading Comprehension Change Across Media Platforms? Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2930

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Also at Tivoli, this playable fish sculpture by Slovenian artist  Vladimira Bratuz Furlan.  A lovely combination of arch, tunnel, resting spot/house, and even climbability that deserves a more sympathetic site!  [source]

The post Midcentury Fish Play Sculpture, Vladimira Bratuž Furlan, Tivoli appeared first on Playscapes.

Percy was not pleased with the renovation.

(Photo: John Clark; Dwell)

Can the presentation of choices on an upgrade screen or talent tree affect how we feel about those choices? Consider the two screenshots of talent trees below. No, look, don’t ask why just yet. Just consider them!

The first one is from the first person shooter Syndicate while the second is from the latest Tomb Raider game. It may not be self evident from still screenshots, but these games handle the presentation of player choices differently. In the Syndicate tree, all your options are set out in one screen. Every time you have a skill point available you can mouse over any of those icons to get descriptions then choose the one you want. In Tomb Raider the choices are presented a little differently: you scroll from left to right through a sequence of skills at the bottom of the screen before deciding where to spend your precious point.

Which system, do you think, is more likely to result in commitment to and satisfaction with skill choices? Which do you think would be less likely to make players feel regret over their decisions and make them less likely to reload a saved game so they can make another choice?

A 2012 study by Cassie Mogilner, Baba Shiv, and Sheena Iyengar in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that Syndicate’s system would be better, based on the metrics of likely satisfaction, commitment, and regret. It comes down to hope for a better alternative and the way our brains tend to process the sequential versus simultaneous presentation of choices.

In one of their experiments the researchers had subjects review a list of 5 different chocolate treats, including a description for each one –e.g., “Waikiki: dark chocolate ganache with a blend of coconut, pineapple, and passion fruit”. In one condition (the “simultaneous condition” or “Syndicate group” in my reckoning) all the chocolate names and descriptions were listed at once. In another condition (the “sequential condition” or the “Tomb Raider group”) participants scrolled through the names and descriptions one at a time before making their choice. Subjects then got a free sample of the confection –YUM!– and were told they were being entered into a lottery to win 25 more pieces.

Then, to get a feeling for how likely each group would be to abandon their choice right before going out the door, the experimenters offered to let them either change their lottery entry in favor of one of the other 4 chocolates they had seen, OR a mysterious sixth chocolate that they knew nothing about.

The results? Those who had seen their choices all at once were much more likely to stick with their original pick and rated their satisfaction with the choice much higher than those who were shown their choices sequentially. Those in the sequential group were twice as likely to switch their lottery entry to another chocolate, but the amazing thing is that they were almost four times as likely to switch it to the mystery chocolate.

The authors argue that invoking the emotion of hope in the sequential group is responsible for this finicky behavior and relative dissatisfaction with decisions. When we see all our possible choices, we know what we need to compare to what –it’s all right there. When, however, we receive one choice at a time, we get into the mindset of comparing each option to an ideal or potential (but not certain) better choice. In other words, we hope that the next one is better. This, in turn, triggers feelings of dissatisfaction with each alternative and ultimately on whatever alternative we settle on. Those little dissatisfactions carry forward and make us more likely to abandon our choices if we’re given a chance –especially for something that we think could satisfy our hope for something better.

While we’re on the topic, there’s one other time when this sequential vs. simultaneous presentation comes to mind: Amazon.com’s Lightning Deals vs. Steam’s holiday sales. Amazon will sometimes queue up hourly deals that go on throughout the day. The catch is that they don’t tell you what the hourly deals are going to be. This sounds to me like a sequential presentation of options for those of us without the funds to buy anything we want.

Compare that to the daily smorgasbord of deals that Steam dumps on you every day of their major sales events. Instead of a sequential list of deals that are dripped out, you get a fire hose of bargains all at once. Based on what I described above, which do you think would result in more satisfaction once consumers have made their choice?

Finally, game designers might look to hijack this effect and bend it to their own ends. Sometimes maybe they WANT to have players feel regret over a choice or have a feeling that things might have been better if they had made a different narrative or moral choice. In that case, designers might want to not offer all those choices in one menu or one dialog list. Maybe they would be better served by presenting them one by one and not giving players the option of backtracking. Little things matter.

Did you find this kind of thing interesting? Really? Well, who am I to judge? You might want to follow me on Twitter, RSS, or Facebook to see more.

REFERENCES

Mogilner, C., Shiv, B., Iyengar S. (2012). Eternal Quest for the Best: Sequential (vs. Simultaneous) Option Presentation Undermines Choice Commitment. Journal of Consumer Research, 39, 1300-1312.

Cuttlefish, species unknown.