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 [email protected] Have your say on the research featured here – visit the Digest blog: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/ Download a free Digest poster: http://tinyurl.com/4kyph Subscribe free at: www.researchdigest.org.uk 1 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 Subscribe free at: www.researchdigest.org.uk 2 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/ Subscribe free at: www.researchdigest.org.uk 3 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 Subscribe free at: www.researchdigest.org.uk 4 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 Subscribe free at: www.researchdigest.org.uk 5 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/ Subscribe free at: www.researchdigest.org.uk 6 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/ Subscribe free at: www.researchdigest.org.uk 7