RoyMogg's Blog

For most of us, it’s tricky enough to remember what we were doing this time last week, let alone on some random day years ago. But for a blind 20-year-old man referred to by researchers as HK, every day of his life since the age of about eleven is recorded in his memory in detail. HK has a rare condition known as hypermnesia, like the opposite of amnesia, and his is only the second case ever documented in the scientific literature (the first, a woman known as AJ, was reported in 2006; pdf).

Brandon Ally and his team have completed comprehensive tests with HK and they’ve scanned his brain and compared its structure with 30 age-matched controls. They found that HK has normal intelligence, that he performs normally on standard desktop tests of short and long-term recall, and that he has normal verbal learning skills. It’s specifically his autobiographical memory that’s

Continue reading Total recall: The man who can remember every day of his life in detail

Most of us have done it – told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.

Some participants were told they’d be providing the feedback face-to-face, others were told their feedback would be provided anonymously, and a third group were told their ratings of the essay would not be fed back to the writer. Additionally, the participants answered questions about their own self-esteem and they were given information about the writer’s self-esteem, which was presented as either low, medium or high.

The findings provided strong evidence that we mostly withhold negative feedback to protect ourselves, not to protect the person we’re judging. If people’s motives were selfless then arguably the

Continue reading Who are you protecting when you praise a dud performance?

When objects are arranged in an array from left to right, the central item jumps up and down and calls out to you “Pick me, pick me!” Well, not literally, but in a new study psychologists have provided further evidence for what’s called the “Centre Stage effect” – our preferential bias towards items located in the middle.

Paul Rodway and his colleagues showed 100 participants (65 women) a questionnaire consisting of 17 questions, wherein each question featured five different pictures of the same item or type of item (e.g. five scenic views or five border terriers). Each set of five pictures was arranged in a horizontal row and the task for participants, depending on the question, was either to pick their most preferred or least preferred item. When picking out their favourite, the participants showed a clear preference for the central items; by contrast, no position bias was found when selecting

Continue reading People prefer the middle option

Give people a choice of two cross-country routes to the same destination, one more northerly, the other more southerly, but both covering similar terrain, and they’ll tend to favour the southerly route, and to anticipate it being quicker and easier going. According to a new study, this is true for people who’ve been tested from regions such as Southern New England in the USA, where the north is more mountainous, but it’s true too for people who live in regions such as Sofia in Bulgaria, where the south is mountainous and the north is flat. Tad Brunyé and his colleagues think this spatial bias may have to do with our life-long association of north with up (with additional connotations of being uphill) and south as down – as is the convention on maps.

Brunyé’s team tested this idea with a series of implicit association tasks. Student participants from Tufts University in Boston looked at

Continue reading People assume it’s hillier up north

The potentially harmful effect of ultra-thin models and air-brushed female celebrities on the body image and self-esteem of women is well-documented. Could the increasing participation of women in professional sport prompt the media to portray female role models in a different, more beneficial light? Anecdotal evidence suggests not. To take just one example, prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics, female Olympic skiers and snowboarders appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in - you guessed it - bikinis. A new study of 258 US school girls and 171 female undergrads by Elizabeth Daniels has investigated how women and girls feel when they see sexualised images of female athletes.

The participants were allocated to one of three conditions – they either looked at five images of female athletes in a sporting context in their full sporting attire (the basketball player Anne Strother; the skateboarder Jen O’Brien; the tennis player Jennifer Capriati; the surfer Lisa Anderson; and the football player Mia Hamm),

Continue reading How do women and girls feel when they see sexualised or sporty images of female athletes?

Inside the human brain there is a map of the body drawn in neural tissue. When a person loses a limb, the neural representation of that body part still exists in the map, and more often than not, it continues to give rise to “phantom” sensations. Sometimes neurons in adjacent areas of the body map invade the tissue that represents the missing limb. This can lead to the curious situation where stimulation of a person’s face (or other areas) provokes feelings in their phantom limb, as documented by the great neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. Cases like this are often cited as evidence for the brain’s plasticity.

Now Ramachandran and his colleague Paul McGeoch have reported a phantom limb case that illustrates how aspects of the body map are apparently hard-wired. The case is a 57-year-old woman (known as R.N.) who was born with a deformed right hand consisting of only three fingers

Continue reading The woman who grew phantom fingers that she’d never physically had

As he prepared for his blind date, Kevin was determined to leave nothing to chance. For starters, his date for Valentine’s evening thought his name was Jake. You see, Kevin was a shrewd chap who’d decided he was going to use all the latest psychological science to boost his romantic chances. A recent paper showed that unfashionable names could put people off. He’d even made a name badge with Jake written in bold, and pinned it to his (carefully chosen) bright red shirt.

That was one of the easier lessons to implement. The fake scar, a long, jagged line down his right cheek, was trickier to get hold off. Of course, he was also wearing his boots with the chunky heels. He’d also been listening to Barry White tapes to help practise speaking with a more manly voice than usual. Attention to detail, that was key, Kevin kept telling himself, attention

Continue reading A cautionary tale about using psychology to boost your Valentine’s chances

It’s only in recent times that scientists have discovered there are dedicated nerve pathways for communicating the sensation of itch. This troublesome skin signal provides us with a mixed experience. The prickly discomfort of an itch can be agonising. Yet to scratch an itch is one of life’s great pleasures. In fact, it often seems that the more intense the itch, the more unreachable its source, then the greater the ultimate pleasure that’s derived from finally reaching and clawing at it.

Now the aptly named Gil Yosipovitch and his colleagues have performed one of the first comparisons to see if itches are itchier on some body parts than others. They also investigated whether scratching itches in some places brings more satisfaction than others.

The researchers used cowhage spicules to induce itchiness on either the forearm, ankle or the back of 18 healthy volunteers (10 women; mean age 34). After the spicules were

Continue reading The particular pleasure of scratching an itch on the ankle

Social networking sites have changed our lives. There were 500 million active Facebook users in 2011 and approximately 200 million Twitter accounts. As users will know, the sites have important differences. Facebook places more of an emphasis on who you are and who you know. Twitter restricts users to 140-character updates and is more about what you say than who you are. A new study asks whether and how the way people use these sites is related to their personality, and whether there are personalty differences between people who prefer one site over the other.

David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online – most (70 per cent) were based in Europe, others were from North America, Asia and beyond. There were 207 women and the age range was from 18 to 63. Participants answered questions about the way they used Facebook and Twitter and which site they

Continue reading Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?

We wore ankle-length blue coats at my school, in the Tudor-style. When it rained, the wool of the coat gave off a pungent smell, rather like wet dog. Now when I encounter a similar scent, it propels me back in time to my school days. This effect is called the “Proustian phenomenon”. The name comes from Proust’s description in Remembrance of Things Past of how the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine biscuit transported him back in time to his childhood.

Smells do have this uncanny, evocative power, don’t they? It’s because of the relative proximity of the olfactory bulb (which processes smells) and the hippocampus and amygdala, which are involved in memory and emotions. Right?

Not so fast. In fact very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt.

Marieke Toffolo and her collaborators invited 70 female student participants to

Continue reading Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?