Help students understand the symptoms of dementia by experiencing some of those                     symptoms themselves through the free “A Walk Through Dementia” Android app created by Alzheimer’s Research UK in cooperation with Google UK volunteers. There are four videos: a short introduction to dementia, visiting the supermarket, walking home, and making tea. The videos illustrate a number of dementia symptoms which are presented as a bulleted list at the end of each video. While the videos can be experienced in both the Android app and (3 out of 4 videos) on YouTube (see below), the more powerful experience is the interactive virtual reality (VR) version. For the VR experience, students will need an Android phone, the free “A Walk Through Dementia” app available through Google Play, headphones (which students likely already have), and VR goggles. Affordable VR goggles can be purchased here. And by affordable, I mean KnoxLabs is running a fall 2016 sale where their cardboard goggles are $5 each. There are several other goggles available for around $15 each.  A quick note of caution. Running any VR app on my Galaxy S6 phone heats it up pretty quickly. I can watch just a few minutes of VR before my app is shut down for overheating. My phone cools down rapidly, and in short order I can watch another video. Your mileage may vary. As an in-class VR activity, divide students into groups of three to six. The number of groups you have will depend on how many VR googles you have. Make sure there is at least one Android phone owner in each group. Ask the Android phone owners to search for and download from Google Play the “A Walk Through Dementia” app. Groups are to plug in the headphones, run the app, and put the phone in the goggles. Have each group member go through a different scenario, i.e. one group member experiences the grocery store, another experiences the walk home, and another experiences making tea. (If there are six students per group, each video is watched by two students.) While experiencing VR, students can sit or stand, but they absolutely should not walk. It’s too disorienting – falling would be expected. At the end of each video, the student who watched it notes the symptoms depicted. Once everyone has watched a video, each student explains to the others in the group what they experienced, being sure to outline the symptoms. Give students an opportunity to share their experience in the VR world with the class. Ask what was most surprising about what they learned. Introduction Video Link : 1780   Walking home Video Link : 1781 Making tea Video Link : 1782 ... View more

Originally posted on September 28, 2016.  We social psychologists have reeled on a couple recent occasions over news reports of unreplicated studies, including one of my favorites—the pencil-in-the-teeth versus mouth of how manipulated facial expression affects mood. But then we also revel in the visible discussions of one of our bigger ideas: implicit bias, which Hillary Clinton obviously understands: Debate moderator Lester Holt: Secretary Clinton, last week, you said we’ve got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias. Do you believe that police are implicitly biased against black people? Hillary Clinton: Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other. And therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way? In some of the many experiments that reveal implicit bias, people are challenged to do as police sometimes must—to make a split-second decision whether to fire a gun, depending on whether a pictured person is holding a gun or, say, a phone. In these experiments, Blacks more than Whites are misperceived to be gun-holding. Vice presidential candidate Mike Pence apparently is unconvinced (if aware) of these experiments: “Donald Trump and I believe there's been far too much of this talk of institutional bias or racism within law enforcement.” ... View more

Originally posted on September 23, 2016. As the current U.S. presidential campaign richly illustrates, “motivated reasoning” powerfully sways how we view reality. Researchers have long known that people’s gut-level liking or disliking of a candidate channels their perceptions and beliefs. When a Democrat is President, Democrats have said presidents can’t do anything about high gas prices. Republicans have said the same when a Republican is president. But when the president is from the opposing party, both believe presidents can affect gas prices. In the late 1980s, most Democrats believed inflation had risen under Republican president Ronald Reagan (it had dropped). In 2016, reports Public Policy Polling “Republicans claim by a 64/27 spread that [under Obama] unemployment has increased and by a 57/27 spread that the stock market has gone down.” Actually, the stock market has nearly tripled and unemployment (shown below) has plummeted. Alas, politics trumps facts. Big time. As an old Chinese proverb says, “Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes.” ... View more

Originally posted on September 15, 2016. With thanks to Christopher Platt (NIDCD Director of Hearing and Balance programs), here’s a simple demonstration of our super-speedy vestibular system. As you have surely noticed, if you slip, your vestibular sensors automatically, in a microsecond, direct your skeletal response—well before you have consciously decided how to right yourself. Our vestibular sense is even faster than our visual sense. Try this, suggests Platt: Hold one of your thumbs in front of your face, then move it rapidly right to left and back. Notice how your thumb blurs. (Your vision isn’t fast enough to track it.) Now hold your thumb still and swivel your head from left to right. Voila! Your thumb stays in focus, because your vestibular system, which is monitoring your head position, speedily moves the eyes. Head moves right, eyes move left. Vision is fast, but the vestibular sense is faster. ... View more

Originally posted on September 8, 2016. San Bernadino. Paris. Nice. Orlando. Munich. Dallas. The recent cluster of horrific events make us wonder: Is such violence socially contagious? Or do killings come in clusters merely for the reason that streaks pervade hospital births and deaths, or basketball shots and baseball hits—because random data are streakier, with more clusters, than the human mind expects? World War II Londoners noticed seeming patterns to where German bombs hit. Were the East Enders receiving more than their share because the Germans were trying to alienate the poor from the rich? After the war, a statistical analysis revealed that the bomb dispersion was actually random. But some social happenings are contagious. Airplane hijackings and suicides occur in nonrandom bunches. After Marilyn Monroe committed suicide in 1962, 303 more people than average took their lives that month. When the suicide is well-publicized (if it’s a celebrity and is reported on television), copycat suicides become especially likely. Media experiments, from the Bandura Bobo Doll experiments to the present, indicate that violence-viewing also evokes imitation. So, in some cases, have real-life murders and mass killings, as happened with the rash of school shootings during the eight days following the 1999 Columbine High School shooting rampage. Every U.S. state except Vermont experienced threats of copycat attacks. Some mass killers also are known to have been obsessed with previous mass killings. Albert Bandura We can hope that mass killings, like school shootings, may subside over time. But given a possible terrorist motive—to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, by driving support toward an authoritarian law-and-order candidate—I am apprehensive. ... View more

Originally posted on August 24, 2016. In an earlier post, I mentioned a report that says “that narcissists make good first impressions, but over time, their arrogance, bragging, and aggressiveness gets old.” This finding replicated an earlier study showing that, in the laboratory, people’s initially positive impressions of narcissists eventually turn negative. People’s general dislike of narcissistic, egotistical people is also explored in a 1997 chapter by Wake Forest University social psychologist Mark Leary and three others—one of whom (fun fact) was Leary’s student collaborator, Tim Duncan . . . who just retired after an acclaimed 19-year National Basketball Association career with the San Antonio Spurs. I earlier wondered: “Will this [narcissists don’t wear well] phenomenon hold true for Trump and eventually deflate his popularity during this U.S. presidential campaign season?” The presidential horse race isn’t over until it’s over. The New York Times projects that Hillary Clinton’s current chance of losing equals an NFL field goal kicker’s chance of missing a 20-yard-line attempt (which happens). But so far in polls, betting markets, and statistical projections (below), Trump’s inferred narcissism seems to be playing out much as the research would predict. THE NEW YORK TIMES UPSHOT PROJECTION OF EACH CANDIDATE’S CHANCE OF WINNING. ... View more

Originally posted on August 16, 2016. In Psychology, 11th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I illustrate brain plasticity with a 6-year-old girl who had most of her right hemisphere removed to end life-threatening seizures. In one of the most astonishing neuroscience findings, her remaining hemisphere compensated by putting other areas to work, enabling her to function well. One medical team, reflecting on other child hemispherectomies, reported being “awed” by how well the children had retained their memory, personality, and humor. The younger the child, the greater the chance that the remaining hemisphere can take over the missing hemisphere’s functions. Only recently did I become aware—thanks to a delightful new article by Scott Lilienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn—of a review of 52 hemispherectomy cases by Benjamin S. Carson and six of his Johns Hopkins colleagues. Nearly half of the 52, the Carson team reported, were living successful independent lives—at their age level in school or working productively. And, yes, for the rest of the story, “Carson” is that Benjamin Carson . . . or as he later became known to millions of Americans, 2016 Republican presidential hopeful, Ben Carson. ... View more

Originally posted on August 2, 2016. News flash . . . from the current New Yorker (July 24, 2016), Wall Street Journal (July 25, 2016), and Time (August 8, 2016) . . . “In the most rigorous study to date, researchers pitted different types of cognitive training head-to-head and concluded that one strategy in particular—a kind of computerized brain training that helps the mind to process information more quickly—can significantly lower rates of cognitive decline and dementia.” So impressed is Time (from which those words come) that it promotes, at the article’s conclusion, a smartphone app available for $96 annually that the researcher recommends “for everyone over 50. . . . There’s now evidence that this type of training has multiple benefits, the risk is minimal, and it’s not even expensive.” Money can’t buy advertising that credible-seeming. And the study is, indeed, impressive-sounding. It reportedly trained nearly 3000 people for five weeks and then followed them for 10 years. But is this a case of premature hyping of research (via a University of South Florida press release)? Other prominent researchers with whom I have corresponded raise two caution flags. First, a 2014 scientific consensus statement found “no compelling scientific evidence” that brain games can reduce or reverse cognitive decline and warned against “exaggerated and misleading claims.” Researcher Zach Hambrick summarizes: “Play a video game and you’ll get better at that video game, and maybe at very similar video games,” but not at driving a car or filling out your tax return. What is more, new research reviews—here and forthcoming in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (“Do ‘Brain Training’ Programs Work?”)—confirm that brain training appears not to produce any lasting, meaningful change apart from the training task. Second, the newly reported findings, though presented at a convention, have not yet been published. As the New Yorker writer acknowledged, the “findings may not stand up to peer review, or they may turn out to be a fluke that cannot be replicated by others. Perhaps her central conclusion—that a dozen hours of training cuts the risk of dementia nearly in half, ten years later—will have to be walked back.” With this level of publicity (including other outlets) there’s no easy walking back the public message. Will this big new study point us toward a brain-training program that does work? Stay tuned. And until such evidence is published and replicated, I’d suggest that we psychological educators not over promise. ... View more

Originally posted on July 13, 2016. “America is not as divided as some have suggested,” observed President Obama in the aftermath of recent shootings by and of police officers. The President, who has previously displayed a deft understanding of behavioral science concepts, perhaps had in mind the availability heuristic—our tendency to estimate the likelihood of events based on their mental availability. Dramatic, vivid events—often those we can picture from news reports—come to mind more readily than statistical facts. Thus risks that easily pop into mind we exaggerate. Some examples: Seeing Jaws caused many folks to fear shark attacks (despite being vastly more at risk from a car accident when driving to the beach). With images of air disasters in mind, many people fear one of the safest modes of travel—commercial flying. And with graphic videos of the seemingly senseless shootings by two police officers (among the more than 900,000 U.S. law enforcement officers), it is understandable that some people are now feeling heightened fears of all police, and that the ensuing slaughter of five police officers has further heightened our sense of racial division. Post-Dallas, some folks also are worried about police officers increasingly being killed, allegedly due to President Obama’s rhetoric feeding a “war on cops” . . . although, actually, assault-caused police fatalities have declined under Obama (compared to his four predecessors). These horrific incidents—committed by but three guys with guns—are likely, as the President implies, being overgeneralized. Yet there is real evidence that racial bias and injustice are, indeed, a continuing social toxin. In a case reminiscent of Philando Castile, Amadou Diallo in 1999 was riddled with 19 bullets while pulling out his wallet, which police misperceived as a gun. Not content to stop with this anecdote, social psychologists have repeatedly asked research participants to press buttons quickly to “shoot” or not shoot men who suddenly appeared on screen, while holding either a gun or a harmless flashlight or bottle. Compared to White men holding a harmless object, Black men were "shot" more frequently (by all viewers, regardless of race). So Minnesota’s governor was probably right to suggest that, had Castile been White, he would be alive today. Acknowledging implicit, ingrained racial bias, FBI Director James Comey, in his 2015 report on “Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race,” said this “is why we work to design systems and processes that overcome that very human part of us all.” Moreover, while Castile’s being pulled over last week by police is merely a single data point—no basis for generalizing about law enforcement disproportionately targeting Black drivers—the FBI-reported fact is that Black drivers in the U.S. are about 30 percent more likely than White drivers to be stopped by police. And they are three times more likely to be searched. For Philando Castile, who had reportedly been stopped 52 times by police since 2002, this statistic was a lived experience. So, yes, horrific events that kill people dramatically do distort our fears. And we are, as the President suggested, prone to overgeneralize from such. Three guys with guns are not the best basis for drawing wholesale conclusions about race in America. Yet, as studies of implicit bias in the laboratory and the real world remind us, the pursuit of racial justice and reconciliation is unfinished business. And if it takes shocking events to make White folks see this, my race-expert colleague Charles Green (who blogs here) wonders: is it because of an unavailability heuristic? For those living in a nearly all-White world, are the everyday economic and social stresses of Black American life largely invisible? And is Green right to conclude that “White Americans are UNDER-concerned about racism” because, apart from dramatic happenings, there are so few memorable examples of racism available in their minds? ... View more

You and your spouse are in a grocery store. You see a man in his mid-40s walking with a 5-year-old girl. He has the girl’s hair wrapped around the handle of the grocery cart. The girl is “crying: ‘Please stop! I won’t do it again’” (Mele, 2016). Before covering the bystander effect, describe that scenario to your students. Ask your students to jot down what they would do, and then share their responses with one or two students near them. Ask for volunteers to share their responses (or collect anonymous responses by paper or using a classroom response system). Note the responses. Do they fall into the bystander intervention decision tree? We first have to notice that something is happening. Since the scenario is presented, students have no choice but to notice. But do some students respond by saying that they would act like they hadn’t noticed? After noticing, we have to interpret what we are seeing as something that needs our attention. Did some of your students decide that it was okay for this man to treat this child this way? Do your students differ on what appropriate parenting looks like? Lastly, we have to decide that we have a responsibility to help. That help can take many forms, from confronting the man to contacting store security to calling the police. The type of help given may depend on how threatened the students believe they would be by the man. Introduce this decision tree to students using their responses. This incident took place in Cleveland, Texas in mid-September, 2016. A woman, Erika Burch, who was shopping with her husband did respond. She confronted the man. He did not let the girl go. The woman called 911. A police officer who happened to be in the store quickly appeared, and at that point, the man – the girl’s father – let go of the child’s hair. If time allows, ask students who chose not to intervene in the hypothetical situation how the scenario would have needed to be different for them to intervene. For students who chose to intervene, ask what kinds of parenting discipline would be okay enough for them not to intervene.   References Mele, C. (2016, September 28). Should you intervene when a parent harshly disciplines a child in public? Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/us/should-you-intervene-when-a-parent-harshly-disciplines-a-child-in-public.html ... View more

When covering research methods or as a research methods boost in health psych in Intro, ask your students, “Do fitness trackers, like Fitbit, work? If you were a psychological scientist trying to answer this question, how would you do it?” Give students a couple minutes to think about this on their own. Next, ask students to work in pairs or small groups to design an experiment that would help answer this question. As you circulate among the groups, make sure the groups are answering the question “Do fitness trackers work… at doing what?” As discussion is winding down, bring the class back together and ask for groups willing to volunteer their experimental designs. There should be some sort of random assignment to wearing a fitness tracker or not. Ask students why? [Because if you compared existing users with existing non-users, the users may already be more motivated to engage in physical activity.] Ask students to identify the independent variable [fitness tracker usage] and the experimental condition [fitness tracker] and control condition [no fitness tracker]. How long did students think participants should use/not use a fitness tracker to ensure a fair test? Why that amount of time? Ask students to identify the dependent variable(s) [perhaps weight loss]. With class discussion on the design wrapping up, share with students the results of such a study (Jakicic, et.al., 2016). Participants (470 of them) were six months into a 2-year weight-loss study when they were randomly assigned to either wear a fitness tracker that included a website for monitoring diet or self-monitor exercise and diet via a website (74.5% completed the study; every six months, participants were given $100). Note that this study did not have a no-treatment control group. Ask students to predict the results by a show of hands or via an audience response system. A. Fitness-tracker users lost the most weight B. Self-monitors lost the most weight C. Fitness-tracker users and self-monitors lost about the same amount of weight. Ready for the results? Those assigned to wear fitness trackers lost 3.5 kg (7.7 lbs). Those assigned to self-monitor lost 5.9 kg (13 lbs). There were no differences in the groups at the 6-month mark, the point in the study where they were randomly assigned to wear the fitness tracker or self-monitor. But at the next three check-ins (12 months, 18 months, and 24 months), the self-monitoring group had always lost more weight. Did your students guess right? Were they surprised by the results? Some explanations for these results are offered in this NPR story. But before you share these with students, ask students to generate some hypotheses as to why the self-monitoring group lost more weight than the fitness-trackers. If time allows, give students a couple minutes to think on their own before sharing in pairs or small groups.  Ask student volunteers to report out their hypotheses. Write the hypotheses where students can see them. If you’d like to send students off with a take-home assignment, assign students to design an experiment (but not conduct it!) that would test one of the student-generated hypotheses. Students should identify their independent and dependent variables and anything else they would do that would eliminate confounding variables. You can either let students choose the hypothesis, or assign hypotheses by last name, e.g., “If you’re last name begins with A through F, you have hypothesis 1.” Students can submit as a written assignment, or if you have time at the beginning of the next class, give students an opportunity to share their designs with each other, and then take a few minutes to ask volunteers to share their designs.   Reference Jakicic, J. M., Davis, K. K., Rogers, R. J., King, W. C., Marcus, M. D., Helsel, D., . . . Belle, S. H. (2016, September 20). Effect of wearable technology combined with a lifestyle intervention on long-term weight loss: The IDEA randomized clinical trial. Retrieved from http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2553448 ... View more

This extinction illusion (Hermann grid variation) has been making the rounds on social media courtesy of a Facebook post by psychological scientist Akiyoshi Kitaoka. There are 12 black dots in this grid. Most people cannot see them all at once. The illusion itself first made an appearance in a 2000 journal article by Ninio & Stevens. Check out their paper for other illusions. The larger lesson for your students: Our senses, including vision, allow our brains to create a representation of the world around us. Our senses do not allow our brains to generate a perfect replication of the world. For students who want to know why the illusion works, well, that’s a little more challenging. The short answer is that our retinas are hard-wired to send the clearest, sharpest signals to the brain. Receptor cells that get the strongest signal block out the weaker signals. Those dots in the periphery get blocked by the grey that surround them thanks to the sparser rods in the periphery. For the longer answer, read up on lateral inhibition. Wikipedia provides a nice summary. (Yes, lateral inhibition is also used to explain Mach bands.) If you want to wade into this even deeper with your students, Wesley Jordan (St. Mary’s College of Maryland) has created a class activity that should help students understand lateral inhibition.   References Ninio, J. & Stevens, K.A. (2000). Variations on the Hermann grid: An extinction illusion. Perception, 29, 1209-1217. ... View more

Years ago, as a young instructor, I didn’t have the tools to help my struggling students who came to my office for studying advice. I had a clear idea of what “studying” was since I had done it for so long, but I don’t know if it’s that I couldn’t put words to what I did to study or if I assumed that everyone did the same thing when “studying,” and that if that didn’t work, I didn’t know what would. In any case, over time, I got better at my advice – test yourself, space out your studying, for example. One term I had a student who earned a perfect score on an exam. Students in the class knew somebody did, and they asked who it was. I said I couldn’t reveal the person’s name, but that person can if so desired. My perfect-score student immediately said, “I did! And I’m proud of it.” The other students began peppering her with some version of “How did you do it!” She explained that she spent time every day on the class. She read the textbook, took notes, merged her textbook notes with her class notes, thought of examples, tested herself over what she was learning. Students started exclaiming, “Oh! I don’t want to do all of that!” Her response? “Then you don’t get an A.” Learning is hard work. There’s no way around it. For students who are willing and able to put in the hard work, I want them to use effective, research-based study techniques. Unfortunately, students may not know what those research-based study techniques are. Some of the techniques students use may be a complete waste of time. Gurung, Weidert, and Jeske (2010) asked 120 students to complete a questionnaire on 35 different study behaviors. The behaviors that correlated positively with the students’ final exam scores: “attended every class,” “answered every question in the study guide,” “used practice exams to study,” and “was able to explain a problem or phenomenon using the material.” Behaviors that correlated negatively with exam scores: “after class, I looked over my notes to check for and fill in missing information,” “highlighted the most important information in each chapter to review later,” “reviewed the chapter after the lecture on that topic,” “asked… a classmate/friend to explain material I didn’t understand,” and “asked the professor or TAs for additional materials.” Interestingly, when they looked at just the top half of exam performers, only one correlation remained. Those who reported highlighting as a study strategy scored lower than those who did not. Highlighting is easy to do – it’s too easy to do. It doesn’t require deep processing; it’s a very shallow process. But at the end, with words highlighted, it’s easy to fool oneself into thinking studying was accomplished. Highlighting is really just coloring – and there are reasons coloring is relaxing: it takes little to no cognitive effort. Now, how about some advice on how to study? Yana Weinstein (UMass Lowell) and Megan Smith (Rhode Island College) of the LearningScientists.org blog have created a wonderful set of posters (slides and sticker templates) to help students learn how to study better. The strategies: spaced practice, retrieval practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples, and dual coding. Side note: I love the use of the very specific word practice instead of the fuzzier word study. Elliott Hammer (2016) reports that “I’m also trying as of late to drop the word ‘study’ from my vocabulary in favor of ‘practice. It’s difficult to get students to be more active in their approach, and I want them to get beyond simply trying to read and call that studying. I don’t have data showing that the switch is working, but it feels more genuine.” To get your students to dive into these learning strategies, after covering the memory chapter, ask students to explain why each strategy is effective based on the concepts and research covered in their reading. This makes a nice out-of-class assignment, but it would also work well done in class with small groups. Give each small group the set of posters to explain the effectiveness of each. After discussion wanes, ask a group to report out on one of the posters; give other groups an opportunity to add to the conversation. Move onto another group, and ask them to report out on a different poster. Continue until all of the posters have been covered. If you use a classroom response system, ask students if they currently use the study strategy and whether they plan to use it in the future. Or you could do a jigsaw classroom. Divide the class into 6 groups of at least 6 members each (or 12 groups of at least 6 members or some other multiple of 6, depending on your class size) and give each group a different poster. (For smaller classes, use multiples of 3 and give each group 2 posters). After each group identifies why the strategy is effective (using the concepts learned in the memory chapter), break apart the groups so that at least one person from each group now forms a new group. Ask each new group member to share the strategy on their poster and explain why the strategy is effective. Bonus: Use the Gurung, et.al. (2010) study as examples when you cover correlations in the research methods chapter. Or use it here in the memory chapter to reinforce correlations. And then ask students which learning strategy is being used in the practice of learning correlations.   References Gurung, R. A., Weidert, J., & Jeske, A. (2010). Focusing on how students study. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(1), 28-35. Hammer, E. (2016, July 31). I’m a member of STP and this is how I teach. Retrieved from http://teachpsych.org/page-1703896/4186852 ... View more

What makes synesthesia such a powerful lecture topic in the Intro Psych sensation and perception chapter is that it’s a beautiful illustration of how our experience is merely a representation, and just one representation, of the world around us. The neuroscientist David Eagleman provides a nice introduction to synesthesia in this two and a half minute video. Video Link : 1751 Years ago in class, after I concluded my lecture on synesthesia, a young woman in the back of the room raised her hand. She said she didn’t know her experience of the world was different from everyone else’s until a friend of hers took my class a year earlier. She said a group of them were standing around when he started talking about this cool thing called synesthesia that he learned about that day in his Intro Psych course. He explained that the most common form is seeing sounds where sounds produce color, like a filter has been applied to vision. My current student said to her friends, “Doesn’t everybody experience that?” They all stopped and looked at her. At the age of 18, she learned that she was a synesthete. I made the same error once in class. After talking about synesthesia, I said it’s like when you’re drifting off to sleep and a sudden noise causes a black and white pattern to flash in your vision – sound produces a visual sensation. My students looked at me blankly. Apparently I was the only one with such an experience. My visual experience used to happen pretty regularly, probably a few times a week, but now it’s a rare occurrence, probably once every few months. In any case, I learned that it’s non-existent in many, at least amongst my students that term. I suppose this assumption is a kind of extension of the false consensus effect. We not only assume that others share our beliefs and attitudes, but that others share our sensory experiences. There is research evidence that suggests we are all born synesthetes (see for example Wagner and Dobkins, 2011), and as we mature through infancy and childhood our senses begin to specialize, much like how infants can produce sounds used in all languages only to become specialists in their native language or languages as they develop.   Exploring vision in non-human animals helps students appreciate that their own sensory experiences may be very different from others. For example, dogs have two kinds of cones in their retinas; they detect yellow and blue. That may make them roughly equivalent to humans who have red-green color blindness (Wolchover, 2012). And birds? They have four kinds of cones, the fourth allows them to see ultraviolet light. It’s been posited that the ability to see UV light allows some songbirds to better see each other as their plumage glows with UV light and that raptors can better track prey that leave a urine trail that also glows with UV light. There’s reason to believe that the jury is still out on both of those hypotheses (see for example, Lind, et.al., 2013). Both are given though in this rapid-fire 4-minute SciShow on what birds see. Video Link : 1752 And what about infrared light? While the human eye can’t see it, our digital cameras can. Turn on your cellphone camera and direct it at the end of your TV remote, the end you point toward your TV. Press and hold the "on" button on your remote. You’ll see the light through your phone’s camera even though your naked eye can't see it. This is also the easiest way to determine whether you need to change the batteries in your remote or whether it's just your dog standing in front of the TV’s receiver. For a short in-class next-day assignment – or same-day assignment, if your students have in-class internet access – or for an online discussion board assignment, invite students to research other individual differences in human sensation or differences in sensory experiences between humans and other animals. In class, students can share in small groups, and then invite volunteers to share the most interesting things they found. Ask students to identify the site where they found the information and why they believe the site is a reputable source.   References Lind, O., Mitkus, M., Olsson, P., & Kelber, A. (2013). Ultraviolet sensitivity and colour vision in raptor foraging. Journal of Experimental Biology, 216(19), 3764-3764. doi:10.1242/jeb.096123 Wagner, K., & Dobkins, K. R. (2011). Synaesthetic associations decrease during infancy. Psychological Science, 22(8), 1067-1072. doi:10.1177/0956797611416250 Wolchover, N. (2012, June 26). How do dogs see the world? Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/34029-dog-color-vision.html ... View more

Prosopagnosia – face blindness – used to be thought a rare condition caused only by head trauma. We now know that is not that rare – 2% in the U.S., perhaps (Radden Keefe, 2016) – and that the cause can also be genetic. It also used to be thought that you were either normal or had prosopagnosia. We now know that facial recognition falls on a spectrum. If there is an end of the spectrum where faces are not recognized, it stands to reason that there is another end of the spectrum where faces are easily recognized. And there is research to back up that reasoning. They are called super-recognizers. For your students who are 18+, invite them to take the Cambridge Face Memory Test.  “The average score on this test is around 80% correct responses for adult participants.” The page gives 60% as the cut-off for potential face blindness. I came in at 68%. I should add that this test uses only Caucasian males.  Those of you familiar with the other-race effect may wonder about that. And you are right to wonder. They created a Chinese version and compared performance of participants of European descent and participants of Asian descent on both the Chinese version and the European version. As predicted by the other-race effect, participants of Asian descent did well on the Chinese version (average of 85% correct) but less well on the European version (average of 73% correct). Participants of European descent did well on the European version (76%), but less well on the Chinese version (average of 66%) (McKone, et.al., 2012). Developmental psychologists may be wondering how kids perform. A separate study with five- to twelve-year-olds found that kids develop better facial memory as they age. For example, five-year-olds got 66% correct, 8-year-olds got 76% correct, and 12-year-olds got 85% correct (Croydon, et.al., 2014).  While we’re in the middle of this topic, I might as well throw in how good crows are at recognizing human faces (see this article for more information). Don’t ever tick off a crow. What about those super-recognizers, though? How do they perform? Russell, Duchaine, and Nakayama (2009) found four people who were likely candidates for super-recognizer status. They tested them using the Cambridge Face Memory Test. Three of them earned perfect scores; one person missed one. And what are super-recognizers looking at when they look at a face? The eyes? Nope. The nose. It’s unlikely that that’s because the nose has some sort of special significance. It’s more likely that it’s because the nose is in the center of the face, allowing the super-recognizer to take in the whole face (Bobak & Bate, 2016). The forensically-minded may be wondering if the power of super-recognizers could be harnessed to fight crime. Yes, yes it can. New Scotland Yard created the Super-Recogniser Unit comprised of seven (as of August, 2016) police officers who are, well, super-recognizers. What do they do? Most commonly they look at closed circuit television (CCTV) video of crime suspects, and they look at photos of people who have been arrested. They are looking for a match. “It is not uncommon for a super-recognizer, out on the town with friends, to bolt off after spotting someone with an outstanding warrant.” One officer, James Rabbett, “since joining the team full time, six months ago… has made nearly six hundred identifications.” Yeah, but can’t computer recognition software do the same thing? Following riots in London, computers pegged one rioter. How did a super-recognizer do? He identified 190. Are they sometimes wrong? Yep. About 13% of the time. Their identifications alone are not enough to convict, though. Instead their identifications “help direct the investigation” (Radden Keefe, 2016). After sharing this information with students, ask students where else the power of super-recognizers could be put to good use. If students need a hint, point out that looking at ID and looking then looking at someone’s face requires some facial recognition power. Shout out to Ruth Frickle (Highline College) for posting the Radden Keefe New Yorker article to the STP Facebook page, an act that sent me down this research rabbit hole. References Bobak, A. K., & Bate, S. (2016, February 2). Superior face recognition: A very special super power. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superior-face-recognition-a-very-special-super-power Croydon, A., Pimperton, H., Ewing, L., Duchaine, B. C., & Pellicano, E. (2014). The Cambridge Face Memory Test for Children (CFMT-C): A new tool for measuring face recognition skills in childhood. Neuropsychologia, 62, 60-67. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.07.008 McKone, E., Stokes, S., Liu, J., Cohan, S., Fiorentini, C., Pidcock, M., . . . Pelleg, M. (2012). A robust method of measuring other-race and other-ethnicity effects: The Cambridge Face Memory Test format. PLoS ONE, 7(10). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047956 Radden Keefe, P. (2016, August 15). The detectives who never forget a face. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-recognizer-police-force Russell, R., Duchaine, B., & Nakayama, K. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(2), 252-257. doi:10.3758/pbr.16.2.252 ... View more