Psychology stuff and general update

Hello everyone,

Things are good here! We had a two-week break beginning with Good Friday and running through Anzac day (Memorial Day), which was the 25th of April. I did not do anything special over the break as I had a huge project to get done and also managed to get sick halfway through. Easter was fun though, as we had a spirited Easter egg hunt in my flat. In New Zealand, hunting for real eggs does not seem to be the done thing. Instead, you hunt for chocolate eggs, often Cadbury Cream eggs of one variety or another.

The big project I was working on over the break involved gathering materials for the psychology experiment I am helping to set up. We are looking at how the difficulty of pronouncing foreign names affects the judgments people make about those names. The basic idea is that if things are easier to process (in this case, simpler names) we often assume that they are more positive, less risky, more familiar, etc. (Thus if you show somebody fake names of additives in food, they will assume that difficult-to-pronounce additives are more harmful.) These shortcuts are not always helpful, and they can influence us without our noticing it.

So anyway, the search for foreign names accounted for most of my break. As long as I'm talking about psych, here's a probably more interesting demonstration having to do with human attention. If click on the following link, you will find a video of some people tossing a ball around. (Some of you may have seen this before.) Your job is to count the number of passes between the team in white. http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php If the link doesn't work, you may need to copy and paste the address. I will put the answer below, so if you want to try the demonstration, do so before you read on.

I've been trying to go to events put on at university more often this year. Today there was a great speaking event which featured three people talking about gender and development. All of the speakers were very interesting, but my favorite was an MP and former government minister who spoke about her work within the New Zealand government trying to make their international aid programs more effective. One of the nice things about living in a small country is that you tend to be able to get national figures to come and talk to you.

So, have you played the counting game with the video yet? How many passes did you count? Did you notice anything strange? Did you see the gorilla? Over half the people who watch this video don't see him. (If you did see him, congratulations on being observant! It's better to do this in a group so you can laugh at everyone else.) The video is meant to show how selective our attention can be. Something can be right in front of us without our seeing it. I think this is pretty cool, but here's an even better example done on the campus of Harvard. Do you think you'd notice if the person you were talking to changed into another person? People think they will, but quite often don't! (You don't have to participate in this one, just watch.) http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/10.php

I shall leave you with that.

P.S. Sorry, Mom, maybe I'll take some photos of the flat for next time. Grampa, I heartily enjoyed your comments, and periodically suffer from the same epistemological quandaries.