Research Digest 86

Research Digest 86
Contents
Do young children understand irony? P.2
How to practise penalty shoot-outs. P.3
We become more ambidextrous as we get older. P.4
Mindless eating: the food decisions we don’t realise we’re making. P.5
You hunky smile magnet. P.6
Looking for longer but seeing less. P.7
Further information
Editor/writer: Dr. Christian Jarrett
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Research Digest 86
Do young children understand irony?
Some children as young as six already understand the idea that people make
sarcastic remarks, saying one thing but meaning another, according to
psychologists Penny Pexman and Melanie Glenwright.
They presented 70 children aged between six and ten with different scenarios
played out by puppets who made sarcastic comments. For example, if one puppet
scored a goal, the other would say “That was terrible play!” with a sarcastic tone.
Or if the shot missed, they might say “That was a great play!”.
The children then used a rating scale featuring cartoon faces to indicate their
interpretation of a sarcastic puppet’s beliefs (whether he thought it was a good
shot or not), attitude (was he trying to be mean?), and whether or not he was
teasing.
The children found ironic criticisms – such as “that was great play” – easier to
understand than ironic compliments. A grasp of the speaker’s true belief emerged
first, then an understanding of the speaker’s attitude and intention to tease
tended to emerge together, usually in the older children.
Ironic compliments – such as “that was terrible play!” after a goal – caused the
children more problems. In this case an understanding of the speaker’s true belief
and intention to tease appeared together, with an appreciation of his true attitude
only emerging in older children. In fact, only two of the 70 children were always
accurate about the attitudes of the speakers who made ironic compliments.
Pexman and Glenwright said this difficulty with ironic compliments probably
occurs because the correct interpretation of them requires a two-fold process
requiring inhibitory control. First the child must realise the negative statement is
actually positive, then they must realise this positive statement, while
complimentary, is intended in a jokey, teasing way.
“We predict that if one were to assess inhibitory control skills in children…
performance on those measures would be correlated with children’s
comprehension of ironic compliments”, they concluded.
_________________________________
Pexman, P.M. & Glenwright, M. (2007). How do typically developing children
grasp the meaning of verbal irony? Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20, 178-196.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j/neuroling.2006.06.001
Author weblink: http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/people/bio.php?id=pexman
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Research Digest 86
How to practice penalty shoot-outs
Footballers should practise taking penalty kicks in front of as large an audience as
possible and the results should be published, so as to help recreate the pressure
of a real tournament. That’s according to researchers who say the effect of stress
is even more important than skill or experience in determining whether a penaltytaker hits the back of the net.
Penalty shoot-outs are often used to decide tournament games that have ended
in a draw. Five players from each team take one kick each. If the score remains
level after this, one player from each team takes a kick until one side is a goal
ahead from the same number of kicks.
Some commentators have declared penalties to be a lottery, but the contrasting
track records of penalty success between countries tells a different story – for
example, England have lost four of their five penalty shoot-outs at major
tournaments, whereas Germany have won five out of six.
Geir Jordet and colleagues at the Centre for Human Movement Sciences in
Groningen analysed all 409 spot kicks taken in the World Cup, European
Championships and Copa America between 1976 and 2004. They found a higher
penalty success rate at the less important European and Copa America
tournaments (85 and 82 per cent, respectively) relative to the World Cup (71 per
cent), suggesting the pressure of the event was affecting penalty-takers’
performance. Moreover, success was greater for kicks taken earlier in a shootout, when the pressure is lower because each kick is not in itself decisive.
There was also evidence that skill plays a role, because forward players, who
have more goal-scoring experience, tended to be more successful at penalties
than defensive players.
“Psychological variables showed a stronger relationship to [penalty] outcome than
any of the other variables” the researchers concluded. “Knowledge about
psychology should be used to prepare teams for these contests”, they said.
__________________________________
Jordet, G., Hartman, E., Visscher, C. & Lemmink, K.A.P.M. (2007). Kicks from the
penalty mark in soccer: The roles of stress, skill, and fatigue for kick outcomes.
Journal of Sports Sciences, 25, 121-129.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02640410600624020
Author weblink: http://www.sportybusiness.no/
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Research Digest 86
We become more ambidextrous as we get older
We’re unaware of it, but starting in middle-age, our dominant hand gradually
loses its superiority, so that we become, in a sense, more ambidextrous as we
get older.
Tobias Kalisch and colleagues recruited 60 participants who were all strongly
right-handed according to the commonly-used Edinburgh Handedness Inventory
(EHI), which asks people to indicate their favoured hand for several everyday
activities. The participants then completed a range of computerised dexterity
tests, including line tracing, an aiming task, and tapping (pictured left).
Consistent with their claims of right-handedness, the younger group of
participants (average age 25 years) performed far better with their right hand on
all the dexterity tests. By contrast, the middle-aged group (average age 50)
performed just as well with either hand on the aiming task. And the two older
groups (average age 70 and 80 years) performed just as well with either hand on
all the tasks bar one.
Overall, performance tended to be poorer with increasing age, especially for the
right hand. In other words, it seems we become more ambidextrous as we get
older because our dominant hand loses its superior dexterity and becomes more
like our weaker hand.
The findings were supported by a second experiment that used a gadget to record
several hours of everyday hand use among 36 right-handed participants. The
younger participants used their right hand far more than their left, whereas the
older participants used both their hands a similar amount, despite claiming to be
right-handed.
Neurophysiological studies don’t support the idea that one side of the brain ages
more quickly than the other, so the researchers favour a “use-dependent
plasticity” explanation for why our dominant hand loses its superiority. They said
the dominance of our favoured hand is intensified through our use of it in
everyday activities, so “when these activities decrease after retirement, or by the
limitations in older age and sedentary lifestyles, it is conceivable that the
practice-based superior performance of the right hand is no longer maintained…”.
__________________________________
Kalisch, T., Wilimzig, C., Kleibel, N., Tegenthoff, M. & Dinse, H.R. (2006). Agerelated attenuation of dominant hand superiority. PLoS ONE, 1, 1-9.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000090
Author weblink:
http://tinyurl.com/34vtgt
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Research Digest 86
Mindless eating: the food decisions we don’t realise we’re making
How many food-related decisions do you think you make every day? When Brian
Wansink and Jeffery Sobal of Cornell University asked 139 participants this
question, the average answer was 14 decisions. But then the participants were
asked to break a typical day down, and think about how many ‘when’, ‘what’,
‘how much’, ‘where’ and ‘who with’ decisions they made for a typical meal, snack
and drink. When these were added, it showed the participants made an average
of 226 food decisions a day, 59 of which related to what kind of food to eat.
“Given that people so dramatically underestimate the number of food-related
decisions they make in a day, it is not unfair to say we often engage in mindless
eating”, the researchers said.
But not only are we unaware of the number of food decisions we make, we’re also
blind to the environmental factors influencing those decisions, the researchers
showed.
In four field studies, the researchers measured the amount eaten by 379
participants, half of whom were served with a particularly large bowl or plate of
food. The participants given the extra-large servings ate an average of 31 per
cent more food than the control participants. But crucially, just 8 per cent of them
said afterwards that they thought they’d eaten any more than they would usually
do. When told they’d been given an extra-large portion, 21 per cent continued to
deny they’d eaten any more than usual, and of those who accepted they had
eaten more than usual, only 4 per cent attributed this to the large plate or bowl
their food had come in, with most others saying they’d eaten so much because
they were hungry.
“This hesitancy to acknowledge one being influenced by an external cue is
common and has even been found when people are presented with tangible
evidence of their bias”, the researchers said. Greater awareness of the food
decisions we make and the factors influencing them could be good for our health,
they added. “Altering one’s immediate environment to make it less conducive to
overeating can help us lose weight in a way that does not necessitate the
discipline of dieting or the governance of another person”.
___________________________________
Wansink, B. & Sobal, J. (2007). Mindless eating. The 200 daily food decisions we
overlook. Environment and Behaviour, 39, 106-123.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013916506295573
Author weblink: http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_content/wansink.htm
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Research Digest 86
You hunky smile magnet
It seems beauty isn’t all in the eye of the beholder after all. Researchers have
shown women rate a man as more attractive after they’ve seen another woman
smiling at him. By contrast, being a jealous bunch, male observers rate a man as
less attractive after they’ve seen a woman smiling at him.
Benedict Jones and colleagues at Aberdeen University’s Face Research Laboratory
first asked 28 women and 28 men to rate the attractiveness of several pairs of
male faces. Next they were shown the same pairs again, except this time one
face in each pair was shown with a woman’s face staring at it from the side,
either with a smiling or neutral expression. When the participants then rated the
male faces for a second time, their ratings had changed for those male faces that
had been stared at by a woman.
Female participants rated a male face as more attractive after it had been stared
at by a smiling woman, but less attractive if a woman with a neutral expression
had stared at it. By contrast, the male participants showed the opposite pattern,
tending to rate a male face as less attractive after they’d seen a smiling woman
looking at it.
The researchers said this shows our preference for a man’s face is affected by
social cues we pick up from how other people look at him. Apparently a similar
phenomenon occurs in the animal kingdom – for example female zebra finches
prefer a male who they’ve previously seen paired with another female.
_________________________________
Jones, B.C., DeBruine, L.M., Little, A.C., Burriss, R.P. & Feinburg, D.R. (2007).
Social transmission of face preferences among humans. Proceedings of the Royal
Society B, published online.
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=l702637287p47502
Author weblink: http://www.facelab.org/bcjones/
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Research Digest 86
Looking for longer but “seeing” less
Looking for too long at something can sometimes make it harder to ‘see’ what
you are looking for, according to Li Zhaoping and Nathalie Guyader at UCL.
In an odd-one-out type task, a single line orientated like this / was hidden among
dozens of lines leaning the other way like this \ and the participants had to
indicate which side of the screen the oddball was on (see image on Digest blog).
It’s an easy task because the unique line pops out in an attention-grabbing way.
But then the task was made much harder because a vertical or horizontal line
(like this - or like this |) was drawn through all the original slanting lines (see
blog). Again the participants had to spot the oddball - the only item to feature a
line slanting to the right /. The intriguing finding is that the participants’
performance became less accurate, the longer they were given to spot the oddone-out (95 accuracy for a fraction of a second vs. 70 per cent when they had
over a second to look). Some of them even said they felt they had spotted the
odd-one-out, only for it to disappear the longer they looked.
Although only one item featured a line leaning like this /, with a bit of rotation, all
the items were in a sense identical. This is crucial because the researchers said
that looking at the display for over a second meant higher-level visual processing
had a chance to kick in - processing that is used for recognising objects
regardless of their orientation. Once this happened, it made all the items appear
the same. By contrast, when the participants were given less than 100ms to look
at the display, only lower level visual processing had a chance to take place - the
kind of processing that focuses on the features of objects like their orientation and this made the odd-one-out, with its uniquely slanted line, easier to spot.
"Our finding is the first we know of providing quantitative psychophysical data to
suggest that deeper cognitive processing can be detrimental to some visual
cognitive tasks”, the researchers said.
Apparently the participants cottoned on to some performance-improving
strategies, such as deliberately defocusing their vision, or staring at the centre of
the display. The researchers said this was consistent with their explanation
because our peripheral and defocused vision relies more on the magno visual
pathway, which is associated with lower-level, feature-based vision.
___________________________________
Zhaoping, L. & Guyader, N. (2007). Interference with bottom-up feature
detection by higher-level object recognition. Current Biology, 17, 26-31.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.10.050
Author weblink: http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~zhaoping/
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