Mind and behavior
6.6°! The basic constant of social interaction
An interesting Nature.com news presented a study done by two Microsoft researchers on online-chats (MSN messenger). Gathering a very huge amount of data and testing the infamous 6 degrees of overall connectiveness (i.e. that we are only six steps away from anyone else on the planet), hypothesis presented formally by Stanley Milgram in the sixties. [...]
Invisible God and Reflexivity.
An interesting essay on Freud’s last vision of the religion provided by Mindblog select some interesting quotes:
Judaism’s distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God into the mind enriches the individual immeasurably. The ability [...]
Out of body experience
Recently at EPFL, Olaf Blanke’s team designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders. This spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body experiences, leading [...]
Closet Closeness
Just because sometime basic observations about every day’s behavior need to be tested empirically:
source: http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/06/dont-stand-so-close-to-me.php
Middlemist, Knowles & Matter (1976) designed an experiment to test how the speed and flow of men’s urination in a public lavatory was affected by invasions of personal space.
To gather some preliminary data on men’s toilet habits, a pilot study stationed [...]
Crows Adaptation To Urban Environment
intriguing:
Cultural Differences In Emoticon Uses
Livescience.com reports un interesting study about the culture factor in determining the importance of the eyes or the mouth to interpret facial expressions.
According to Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan, “in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth. This [...]
Proxemy In Second Life
Here can be found a very interesting and intriguing video about the “proxemy” phenomenon in Second Life.
Why do I blog this? Personal spaces in virtual spaces have always been a topic of interest in my lab under the impulse of the first research trend at craft about location and real and virtual spaces. It appeared [...]
Is R2D2 The Real Hero Of The Star Wars?
A funny post of cognitive daily I shall report here about social bonding with robots:
In Star Wars, the real hero might be R2D2 — the only character who makes it through all six episodes without falling to the “dark side” of the force. R2D2 is a robot, but everyone in the film treats “him” like [...]
Dogs Show Human-like Learning Abilities
In a creative and insightful experiment, Friederike Range at the University of Vienna in Austria and colleagues trained a collie to always pull the lever with her paw. Then bitch demonstrated to untrained dogs how to pull a lever for food using her paw.
They also taught her to do the same while carrying [...]
Mind-Reading machines
In my previous post I reported work about the “Mind-Reading Machines”. Here is an intersting video giving a newbie dedicated overview of the project
