Science blindness
Here's another example of bad conclusions (and legistation?) coming from good research.
Is it surprising that emotion would affect how the brain processes data? It's not a surprise to me that if I crash cymbals behind someone who is memorizing automatically-progressing flash cards, they might "forget" what happened a few tenths of a second before and after.
Clearly we must make anything that causes an emotional response illegal. The first step should be banning emotionally-provoking images along highways. We all know that we're memorizing the things that we see along the road as we drive, and we don't want that interrupted.
Isn't it clear that anything that catches your attention ("good" or "bad") will decrease your attention toward nearby (spatially or temporally) things? It seems that is the definition of somthing that "caught my attention". Therefore we should overreact and apply an extreme moralistic (republican?) view and try to ban certain images from along our roadways.
Sexy images hurt your eyesightResearchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along - erotic images make you go blind.
According to a report in New Scientist, the research has added to road-safety campaigners' calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents.
The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as "emotion-induced blindness".
David Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence.Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or sexually provocative scenes.
The closer these emotionally charged images occurred prior to the target image, the more frequently people failed to spot the target image, the researchers found.
"We observed that people failed to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images," Zald says.
"We think there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through," Zald explains.
"It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get through" for several tenths of a second.
Comments
This article made me think of a bizarre study conducted by Jaroslav Flegr dealing with the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, a parasite spread by undercooked food and cat feces. Apparently, over 60 percent of the worlds population is infected and most are unaware of it. Jaroslav Flegr found that rats infected with this parasite have slower reaction times and are act more fearlessly. He decided to study infected humans and found that they were 2.5 times more likely to get in a car crash. He believed that if cats were somehow immunized, it would significantly cut down on automobile accidents.
Posted by: Craig | August 28, 2005 06:34 PM