Spoilt For Choice


We all ask for more choice and complain about the trend to simplify stock in our favorite stores as a negative aspect of modern living. We can recall those halcyon days of 20 years ago when you could go into a store and have an enormous choice of items.

Perhaps it is time to rethink that demand. Wouldn't we really prefer to have more of our decisions pre-packaged with perhaps the illusion of choice?  Think about one of our choices, which can lead to high stress levels both before and after you have made the choice, namely our choice of mate.

These days we have more choice than ever before. On-line dating services provides us with pages of potential candidates and speed dating events again leaves us, er... well what?. Spoilt for choice is a phrase that comes to mind. But is this really the case?

Lenton and Francesconi from the Us of Edinburgh and Essex got together to investigate the effectiveness of speed-dating in aiding mate choice (1). They analyzed the outcomes from a total of 84 speed-dating tourneys.

When there was lots of variation in factors such as age, height, occupation and education amongst the contenders, one would assume that it would be an exciting event with many positive dating decisions to be made. Not so, however.  Too much choice resulted in no choice at all and few dates were made. Apparently, if there is little variation, we don’t panic and get down to concentrating on the job at hand and set up lots of liaisons.

Additional News Up-date
Many of us have been following the fate of the New Zealand’s royal visitor. You’ll all recall the Emperor Penguin who turn left in Antarctica and ended up on a New Zealand beach where he overheated and ate sand thinking it was snow and would cool him down. The New Zealanders have decided to call him “Happy Feet” on an antipodean whim.

Well, Happy Feet has recovered from his three high colonics to remove the sand and has now gained almost 10 lbs. It seems that his health insurance has maxed out. He is due to be kicked off the end of New Zealand’s south island and will be pointed in the general direction of the South Pole (2). We wish him luck.

  1. A.P.Lenton and M.Francesconi, Royal Society Biol. Lett., 7, 528, (2011).
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14337401

Media Reality


We hear a lot about the “dumbing down” of the media and we nod wisely as we agree and complain what it is doing to other people's children. The media moguls tell us that they are giving us what we want in the tabloids, whether papers, talk radio or cable/broadcast news. At the same time, financial constraints push good drama off our screens to be replaced by the cheaper casts of ‘reality’ programs. But is there an inevitable reinforcing feedback mechanism working on all of us here?

So we have a major question hanging in the air.  As we read, listen or watch this media content that we huff and puff about becoming dumber everyday, are we becoming dumber as we consume it? Quickly, we will all scream of course not, not me, it’s them out there. Appel in his paper in the current issue of Media Psychology set out to test this (1).

There were 81 participants in their mid twenties who were given versions of a movie script to read. Both scripts were about a 35-year old guy who is extremely unintelligent and a right-wing skinhead to boot. He meets his friends in a bar and gets drunk. The bad version then has him being a soccer hooligan who gets into a fight at the match and misses the ending. He’s so drunk that he sleeps through the next day and then gets mad when he heard his team lost.

The participants were split up into groups. Some had one script some the other. Some groups were asked to note what the differences were between them and Mr. Meir the soccer hooligan. After all this excitement, all the participants were given a 30-question general knowledge multiple-choice examination.

The “dumbest” were the people who were not asked to contrast Mr. Meir’s behavior and their own and the “very dumbest” were those who read the whole sorry tale without any instructions.

The author says that ‘the short term influence on cognitive functioning is a promising new field of enquiry.’ I’m sure that we all hope that the effect is short term, but what about the continual media priming of a plethora of junk for our daily consumption? We know that constant repetition works as a brain washing technique. But if it’s a wide range of rubbish that we consume, does that mean that we’ll all forget who painted Geurnica, or why?

  1. M. Appel, Media Psychology, 14, 144, (2011)

Give Me Latitude


Now that we are in the middle of summer here in the northern hemisphere, all thoughts of our seasonally affective disorder syndrome, SADS, are gone for the moment. Presumably we are all feeling relatively buoyant, or at least as buoyant as the world wide financial shenanigans will allow. The effect of light levels on our sense of well-being and mood is shared with most species, whether diurnal or nocturnal. Birds and primates that spend a lot of time in low light levels, have larger eyes than those addicted to the bright lights.

Of course, the amount of light we get depends on our latitude. Pearce and Dunbar of U of Oxford have been hard at it measuring eye-socket size and cranial volumes of collections of skulls from populations all over the world (1). Bigger eyes can collect more optical information and that greater amount of information requires more processing equipment.

It seems that in the last 10,000 years human eyes have increased in volume by about 15% for those living in the Scandinavian countries compared to those living close to the equator. The brain volume, required for that extra processing, has increased by almost 8%. The visual acuity is the same, so size is not an advantage. It just indicates our need to see what is coming down the pike in the dull, grey northern climes.

The surprising thing is the speed of this evolutionary change. Until the last ice age receded, humans weren’t whooping it up around the Arctic Circle. They only moved up after the ice, which is were the 10,000 years comes in.

We all rush to live in cities. Already more than half the world’s population is urbanized. The reason? As the size of a human agglomerate doubles in size, the wealth, health and benefits increase by 15% as, incidentally, so does crime. In the distant future when all citizens are in cities and city dwellers demand bright lights all the time, will we all end up with beady eyes and smaller heads like Henry Moore sculptures? Or maybe we should wear sunglasses all the time and keep our big heads.

  1. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/07/12/rsbl.2011.0570

You Caught My Eye!


Today I found that a gecko had taken up residence in my garage. It was a markedly melanistic version of the leopard variety. It was also very fast. And it didn’t want to discuss whether or not it was fully documented. As leopard geckos come from Iran and Pakistan, I thought that documentation might be important. For convenience, we can use the initials LG as a name for my visitor.

Whether he, she or it was or was not an illegal alien isn’t the issue that I wish to draw your attention to, however. It is the process of our perception that is interesting. In the case of LG and me, it was a slight movement in my peripheral vision that caused me to turn, dilate my pupils and focus. Two or three seconds later, I said “Oooh!” and it scurried out and disappeared.

This experience fits nicely in with a new paper by Kietzmann et al from the U of Osnabrück on the interplay between overt visual attention and the perceptual outcome (1). So my contralateral visual cortex was booming away with mid-frequency gamma-band activity as LG grabbed my attention, followed by a screeching high-frequency gamma band activity as I put together what it was.

Kietzmann et al’s experiments were of course lab based with fancy eye motion kit set up. Almost 70 subjects were given images to look at. They pressed a button and said what they perceived them to be. Images came in groups of three so that an image could look like one thing. With slight alterations of lines it would look like something else. But in each of these groups of three, there was one image that was neither fish nor fowl, that is, it was ambiguous.

The current big argument out there is does the act of paying attention precede the perception of what your seeing, or do you pay attention after you think you recognize something. Kietzmann et al’s results indicate the former and I am happy to concur wholeheartedly after my unexpected meeting with LG.

My big problem now? Is LG hiding out in my garage or just visiting? If the latter, are my spiders going to get teed-off as they will have competition for the flies and insects that wander to and fro in there when I’m not looking?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022614

Keeping Up Appearances


Locked up in a zoo, however nice but with lots of time on your hands, what would you do? Perhaps get up late, have a leisurely breakfast and then spend time making yourself look and feel good as you wait for the admiring hordes to pass by outside your enclosure taking photographs amidst “oohs” and “aahs” as you pose for them.

If you happened to be a full-grown male mandrill from the old country, you would be looking pretty spectacular in with the bright reds and blues along your aristocratic nose. Pride in your appearance would be essential for your showbiz role. Well-groomed hair and clean nails are of course essential. Pansini and de Rilter of the U of Durham report in the current issue of the Journal of Behavioral Processes that the have surreptitiously filmed a mandrill at his toilette and giving himself a pedicure, no less (1).

Not having been issued with a manicure kit, or even a nail clipper and file, he wasn’t going to appear anything less than well groomed. He therefore resorted to taking a twig and thinning it down to enable him to clean from under his toenails that dirt that always accumulates with all the running around performing for the public outside the bars and the females inside.

If they would only give him some decent AstroTurf instead of the bare earth, he wouldn't have this problem, but even if you rank lower than humans and the other great apes, you have to pay attention to personal hygiene even if you have to make the tools yourself.

When You Come To A Fork, Take The Bigger One


Recall that old perennial cliché that we learnt at out mother’s knee, “don’t bite off more than you can chew,” but later, when we were fourth or fifth grade, it was a warning against taking on older, bigger people who could “whoop us good”. When we were small, it also went along with “your eyes are bigger than your belly.” But how much do we bite off?

We get advice about weight control that tells us to choose smaller portions and we struggle with this, especially in restaurants where the portions are usually large so that we feel we are getting value for money. Recent work by Mishra et al that is published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that nibbling away at our plateful isn’t going to help (1).

These guys ran a restaurant study where the customers were given forks of different sizes. Dishes of food were weighed before serving and on return. The groundbreaking discovery is that those with the large forks left more food than those guys who had little forks.  The big forkers ate 30% less than the little forkers. Don’t you just love unexpected results?

The explanation offered is that you go into a restaurant focused on doing a job, namely satiating your appetite and you expect to expend some effort in forking, chewing and paying to get the job done.  Bigger forkfuls make you think that you are making great progress so you rest up early, while little forks make you think that your doing a second rate job and keep you going longer. Don’t even smile now, the results were reproducible even if they flew in the face of lab experiments.

So, back to the lab. A large group of undergrads, (always good for food consumption experiments,) were told that it was a simple consumption experiment based on pasta salad (not lunch). They could  stop when the didn’t want to eat any more. The big forkers ate more!
  
The message is clear. If you are just idly snacking until you happen to feel full, use a tiny fork. You’ll get bored with the activity. But if you’re going restauranting for a serious meal, speak softly and carry a big fork!

  1. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660838

Luna Rules, OK!


The moon has long fascinated us humans. As it regulates the tides, it is believed to regulate the human emotions. Amongst the medical cognoscenti, this belief is known as the “Transylvania Effect” and the full moon is something of a problem (1). It is strange that while we grow up being frightened by the darkness, some more than others of course, that we also associate the full moon with madness and mayhem.

Owen and McGowan have shown that we no longer have to stay locked away with the shades draw when there’ a full moon as the Transylvania Effect doesn’t have a bat’s chance in hell of being the cause of our madness, collective or otherwise (1).

Where we live also makes a difference. In our cities, we all head for bright lights like moths to the flame. In the country it is different and, moreover, in which country. In some parts of the world, wandering about in the country at night carries some of the same risks as our hominid ancestors had to work around. The chance of becoming a meal for a lion does vary with the lunar cycle (2).

Packer et al have studied the eating habits of lions in Tanzania (2). They tracked when lions are likely to be most hungry and when people have the greatest chance of satisfying that hunger. The best time for the lions was in the dry season when the moon was up early but not full. Just after the full moon gave them the right amount of light for hunting before everyone had gone to bed. 6 to 10 in the evenings were the worst.

So, we should see the full moon as the harbinger of a dangerous time during the following week when we are at a greater risk of being eaten by lions. Early to bed and early to rise makes  a deal of sense.

  1. http://www.gjpsy.uni-goettingen.de/gjp-article-owens.pdf
  2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022285