Read some of the previous research findings from GamesWithWords.org:
Pop psychology assures us that your birth order (oldest, middle, youngest, only) has a major effect on your personality. Many books have been written on the subject. It might surprise you, then, that scientists are not only not sure how birth order affects personality, they are divided on the question of whether birth order has any effect on personality.
In this study, we asked people about their own birth order and the birth order of their best friends and significant others, as well as the birth order of their parents. It turns out that people are slightly more likely to have a close friend or significant other/spouse of the same birth order. We think this suggests that birth order does in fact affect personality, though no doubt the debate will continue. It's important that the method we used -- especially the use of the Internet -- avoided some of the typical confounds of birth order studies.
Published findings (journal article).
Visual working memory refers to our ability to remember what we see for short periods of time. For instance, an artist uses her visual working memory to paint a picture -- she must remember the image she wants to reproduce long enough to paint.
Visual working memory appears to be much more limited than working memory for words. The typical educated adult in America can remember seven words at a time but only the look of four different objects (and even that number is controversial). Some people have managed to learn tricks so as to remember dozens of words at a time, but no similar feats have reported for visual memory.
In this paper, which included data from one of our online studies, we tried to determine if the problem is that visual memory is more susceptible to a particular type of interference (proactive interference). It's not. We'll have to look elsewhere for an answer.
Published findings (journal article). ........
A discussion of the study in our blog
Try not to think about a white bear.
If you are like the typical person, you just thought of a white bear. In fact, it is very hard to successfully try to not think about something. A recent study (Tsal & Makovski, 2006) extended this finding to vision: trying to ignore part of your visual field (such as everything on the left) actually causes you to pay more attention to it.
The way they actually tested this was to surprise participants by flashing a picture in the ignored area (such as on the left) so rapidly it was hard to make out. If people were paying extra attention to that area, they would be able to make out more of the image. To get enough data, they 'surprised' each participant a number of times, so it's not clear whether the participants were really surprised. So we (Makovski & Hartshorne) tried running a similar experiment on the Web, where each person would be surprised only once. The reuslts were unfortunately not clear enough for publication, but we did write up a brief report, linked to below.
lab report
report in everyday language
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