Letters Remain

Tag: senses

  • Apple’s Implementation of the Duration-of-Exposure Effect: Screens at 70˚

    Hours after writing about the duration-of-exposure effect (whereby merely touching an unowned object increases our attachment to it and how much we value it), a post came into my feed reader pointing out how Apple Inc. take advantage of this effect in their “painstakingly calibrated” stores. Carmine Gallo, providing a glimpse into his upcoming book, The Apple…

  • Increasing Attachment and Valuation Through Touch

    The endowment effect is old news: the amount that we value an object increases once we take ownership of it. The ‘extended version’ shows that the impact of the endowment effect increases with time: our valuation of an object increases more and more as the amount of time that we own it also increases. This…

  • The Minds of Dogs and How Pointing Evolved

    Recent research suggests that domestic dogs seem capable of displaying a rudimentary “theory of mind” — a very human characteristic whereby you are able to attribute mental states to others that do not necessarily coincide with your own (in a nutshell). Stray domestic dogs, meanwhile, do not display this trait, suggesting that such mental attributes…

  • Our Amazing Senses

    As neuroscientist Bradley Voytek points out, “we’re used to thinking of our senses as being pretty shite”, and this is mostly thanks to the plethora of animals that can see, hear, smell and taste far better than we can. “We can’t see as well as eagles, we can’t hear as well as bats, and we…

  • How Sounds and Words Affect Taste

    Background noises greatly affect how we taste food. I wrote about this earlier in the year — pointing out that this is the probable cause of bland in-flight meals — but how else can background noise affect our perception of taste, and can our non-gustatory senses affect how we taste, too? To test this, molecular…

  • Background Noise and Taste Perception

    It has been suggested that the physiological effects of pressurisation are responsible for the blandness of in-flight airline meals. However the real reason behind “diminishing gustatory food properties” (food tasting rubbish) while 32,000 feet above sea level could be a lot simpler: the background noise. A study conducted by Unilever R&D and the University of…

  • Embodied Cognition and How Objects Influence Our Perceptions

    The physical properties of objects we interact with can substantially influence our opinion of unrelated items and people. Through a number of novel experiments, MIT’s Joshua Ackerman has clearly shown how the texture, weight, and other physical properties of objects we touch affect our judgements and decisions (neatly summarised by Ed Yong): Weight is linked…

  • Sweetness and the Problem with Diet Sodas

    The link between the sweetness of a food and its caloric content may be a trait that our bodies have evolved to recognise. By disrupting what could be a “fundamental homeostatic, physiological process” by using artificial sweeteners, we could be promoting obesity. That’s the conclusion Jonah Lehrer draws from a study that looks at how…

  • The Benefits of Touching

    ‘Touchier’ basketball teams and players (those who bump, hug and high five the most) are more successful than those who limit their non-playing physical contact. Similarly, higher satisfaction has been reported in romantic relationships in which the partners touch more. Just two of the findings from research looking at the importance of touching in relationships.…

  • More Psychology of Wine

    Most psychology studies focusing on my good friend, wine, rely on applying the scientific method to the tasting of different wines, and this is done in one, relatively simple way: blind tasting. Finance blogger at Reuters, Felix Salmon, isn’t a fan of blind tasting, and after reading his eminently-quotable piece on the subject I tend to…