Girl Monkeys Prefer Dolls, Boy Monkeys Prefer Their Balls

Sorry for not having posted in a while. Sometimes I do other things than reading quantitative data spreads about president name sounds. Sometimes. 


As I was researching edible toys (<------- worth the read), I came across a bizarre study that will likely rancor some of my readers. The researchers put “a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog,” (469) into a cage with some adorable monkeys in order to see if the girl-monkeys liked dolls more and if boy-monkeys instinctively liked toy cars. Weird thing is: it seems they did.

Well, kinda. The researchers recorded two variables for each vervet: approach and contact. Approach meant getting within a meter of a toy. Contact meant anything from touching it to playing with it. The relative times of the vervets’ interactions with each toy was recorded and then analyzed.

Sex differences in response to children’s toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus)

Gerianne M. Alexander, Melissa Hines

Evolution and Human Behavior 23 (2002) 467 – 479

“In some instances, we also noted that vervet monkeys contacted toys in ways that appeared to resemble children’s contact with them, such as moving the car along the ground. They also interacted with the doll in ways that resembled female vervet contact with infants, such as inspecting it physically,” (472).

 “Toys preferred by boys, such as the ball and police car used in this research, have been characterized as objects with an ability to be used actively or objects that can be propelled in space,” (475). Hmm, I have a pretty distinct impression that any object can be “propelled in space.” Girls like anvils? I’m confused.

Strange Findings: “[M]ale animals were more likely to approach and contact toys overall,” (470).

 “Whereas the approach of these Old World Primates to individual toys was unrelated to their sex or to toy category, their contact with the toys was,” (473).

“A preference for red or reddish pink has been proposed to elicit female behaviors to infants that enhance infant survival, such as contact. The hypothesis that reddish pink or red may be a cue signaling opportunities for nurturance and thus eliciting female responsiveness could explain our finding of greater female contact with both the doll (with a pink face) and the pot (colored red),” (474-5).

“[A]ndrogens appear to influence the development of two primate visual pathways that are differentially involved in the processing of object features (such as color or shape) and object movement,” (475).

“However, although female vervets preferred ‘‘feminine’’ toys over ‘‘masculine’’ toys, male vervets did not appear to prefer ‘‘masculine’’ toys over ‘‘feminine’’ toys. This difference between male vervets and boys may indicate that toy preferences in boys are directed by gender socialization to a larger degree than are toy preferences in girls,” (476).

“[I]t seems that, like chromatic color vision, sex-related object preferences appeared early in human evolution, prior to the emergence of a distinct hominid lineage. Primate color vision appears to have evolved to facilitate foraging for fruit and edible leaves. It may be that differential selection pressures based on diverse processing requirements of tasks that are conducted more by males or females (such as infant care) may have contributed to the formation of perceptual categories of objects with differential adaptive significance for males and females,” (476).

I wonder if similar “see-what-the-girl-monkey-touches” would be credible if they had some slight statistical significance. “It was seen that the female spent 23% more time watching Desperate Housewives while the males threw their shit at the TV during this time. This study was not designed to interpret such behavior, but we all know what it means.”

There may be something to the androgen-color perception stuff though. Several other studies confirm similar findings. The explanation for the female vervets’ attraction to the “feminine” red pot/pan is that its redness is linked to a female evolutionary sex adaptation that makes it likely to respond to reds and pinks. That is, maybe, to the little hairless pink faces of their progeny. And since the male monkeys seem to enjoy throwing stuff, maybe it’s better that they are less interested in dolls/babies.

Ok, Evolution and Human Behavior. But maybe if you could consistently differentiate a pot from a pan I would believe you more. 


But one thing all baby monkeys like, regardless of gender, is being flipped upside-down: 

Get the full scoop on baby monkey toy choices on Ziddu.

And leave comments! Enough of you are coming now that I know you are just being lazy. Especially the Germans. I know you have something to say. Keep looking forward to future posts on how you can see things without using your eyes (but with a different organ...), why you can say your night of heavy drinking is like becoming a butterfly, and Malaysian ant sports. 

How the Sound of Your Name Can Win You the Presidency

What’s in a name? Well, possibly the Presidency.

This study shows how certain rhythmic and aural traits of the last names of Presidential candidates show a statistically significant correlation to which candidate gets elected.

Credit: Kim Raff/The News & Advance

Taking the name pairings for candidates from every Presidential election from 1842 (when the popular vote began to be recorded) to 1992, the study's name analysis is 83% accurate in predicting who would win the election. That is, only seven poorly-named candidates won. The study even goes on to give some explanations for those occurrences. For instance, when Van Buren beat Harrison in 1836, his campaign was completely an Andrew Jackson show. Jackson’s name beats Van Buren’s. Since Van Buren kept a low profile, many people were voting for the establishment and for Jackson who had endorsed Van Buren (17).

The reason? Well, probably because the candidates appeal to undecided, centrist, “swing” voters and in attempting not to alienate them do not give very clear stances on the issues that matter to them. Or they all occupy the same stances. So those that go into the voting booth “undecided” don’t have much to decide on. And so they go with their gut. And in this case, the gut is really the ear.

This is the list of name characteristics. Note that category C is a weaker predictor than A and B. 

So how does this all break down for the upcoming election? I’ve scored it below. The three categories correspond to rhythm, vowels, and consonants in that order.

Bachmann: 3 + 1 + .5  or -.5 = 4.5 or 3.5 (discrepancy due to the ambiguity of the "special harshness" category) 

Romney: 3 + 1 + -.5 = 3.5

Cain: -.5 + 0 + 1.5 = 1

Pawlenty: 0 + .5 + 0 = .5

Santorum: 0 + 1 + -.5 = .5

Paul: -.5 + 0 + 0 = -.5

Gingrich: 3 + -1.5 + -2.5 = -1

Funny. That's kind of how I see the likelihood myself. How does Obama do? 

Obama: 0 + 1 or 2 + 0 = 1 or 2 (discrepancy based upon possible expansion of category B4, which could apply to other ending-vowels according to the authors) 

But Obama fans, don’t worry yet. No Presidential candidate has ever won having two medial stops in their family name. Bachmann (ch and m) and Romney (m and n) would fall into this category. Though Romney’s stops are both affricatives which are particularly presidential sounds.

Strange Findings: Adlai Stevenson resigned dropped out of an Illinois 1986 state election because of well-named competition to the party: “Janice Hart beat Aurelia Pucinski, while Mark Fairchild out-polled George Sangmeister,” (159).

Apparently, people have suspected this phenomenon’s potency for a long time. In a 1986 study, fake pollsters asked students would they rather vote for the candidates Fairchild and Sangmeister. These were real candidates but not for the region that the students were eligible voters! Fairchild won easily and only 30% of students refused to answer without additional information! (159)

High back vowels tend to be associated with elites. This explains why Van Buren in the 1840 election was easily characterized as an aristocratic snob even though he was from a working-class background. (170) 

As always, the full article is available on Ziddu. More importantly, e-mail me at weirdresearch@gmail.com how your name ranks on the scale. Would you be able to beat Bachmann? Romney? Or the most confidence-inducing, Presidential, and unsuccessful candidate name of all-time (with a whopping 6.5): Bryan? 

The History of Bedwetting

This latest article is an uncomfortable narrative of enuresis, more commonly known as bed-wetting. If you are wondering why anyone would be in need of a history of something we would all rather forget, you may find it worthwhile to read the full article on Ziddu. Hint: it's a Foucauldian treatment of the issue. 

Luckily, this contraption is now longer in common use.

Memorable Quotations: Bedwetting has posed a slippery problem for the human sciences. Between waking and sleeping, infancy and childhood, it exists in a fluid space. (49) Serious face. 

Praising the treatment of incontinence of urine by ‘mechanical means’, a doctor argues in a prominent medical journal in 1864 for the utility of a vice, which he describes as a ‘formidable rat-trap looking instrument’ for retaining urine in male children. ‘It must be accommodated to the size of the penis, and taken off whenever the patient finds an inclination to make water’ (53)

In his article, ‘Enuresis in Murderous Aggressive Children and Adolescents’, Michaels (1961) insisted that bedwetting was indicative of deeper psychological problems that posed a menace to the social order. (58)

Proctor & Gamble has added a size to its stretch diapers, accommodating children 36 pounds (16.3 kg) and up. The new diapers are advertised by celebrity paediatricians encouraging parents to let their kids toilet-train at their own pace. (60)

[I]n recent advertisements the stigma attached to bedwetting is heavily emphasized: ‘For him there’s nothing worse than waking up cold, wet and alone. Except waking up cold, wet and surrounded by friends.’ (60)

Strange Findings: Until the 17^th century, it was widely thought in Europe that eating the bladders of animals would help with bladder control. (51)

Taking your business inside was not a "natural" development. All the way until the 19th century in Europe public places were the primary sites for...erm...business. (54)

There is an increasing trend of longer delays in toilet training since the 1960s. (60) 

Why Super Mario Bros Is Fun

In honor of Ninetendo's upcoming release of Wii U, we are returning to the original reason for Nintendo's success: Super Mario Bros. Before reading further, I suggest you play a few rounds. 


This awesome study offers empirical evidence for what makes SMB fun and perhaps even more awesome shows how this process can be used to optimize the fun-factor of automatically generated game content. The authors show that, using artificial neural networks (ANN), they can predict with up to 88.66% whether a level will be frustrating to a player and with almost 70% accuracy whether it will be fun. (For a familiar example of gameplay that relies upon ANN, click here.) 

Modeling player experience in Super Mario Bros

Author(s): Pedersen, C.;   Togelius, J.;   Yannakakis, G.N

Source: Computational Intelligence and Games. Sept. 2009. 132 – 139. 

Memorable Quotations: “Several statistical features are extracted from playing data which are logged during gameplay and include game completion time, time spent on various tasks (e.g. jumping, running), information on collected items (e.g. type and amount), killed enemies (e.g. type, amount, way of killing) and information on how the player died.” (2)

“Statistically significant correlations are observed between reported fun and seven features: number of times the player kicked a turtle shell, proportion of coin blocks that were “pressed” (jumped at from below), proportion of opponents that were killed, number of times the run button was pressed, proportion of time spent moving left, number of enemies killed minus times died, and proportion of time spent running. All of these were positive correlations.” (5)

“The fun inherent in setting of complex chains of events with simple actions is something many players can relate to and which features prominently in many games, but which is to our knowledge not part of any of the “established” theories of what makes games fun.” (5) Is this an explanation of what makes Portal so addictive? 

“To the authors, cannons are perceived as some of the most difficult elements on a level. However, players reported lower challenge on levels where they ducked many times. We have yet to find an explanation for this.” (5)  

Strange findings: How you perform during your last life is a large determinant in how frustrating you find a particular level. (7)


Here is that frustration in action. It's intense: 

And now you can get even more excited for the upcoming release. 

Download the full, fun article on Ziddu. 

Grading Olympic Mascots

Which are the three best (and worst) mascots? The results of the study (yes, studying this question) are at the bottom of the post.See if you can guess!

A study of cognitive human factors in mascot design

Source: International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics 23 (1999) 

Author(s): Rungtai Lin, P.C. Lin, K.J. Ko

If you’re a sports fan (or alternatively someone who likes to get drunk and argumentative in sports bars), you’ve probably had a debate about which team has the best mascot. Thankfully, for baseball at least, the debate has been settled correctly.

Nonetheless, cognitive ergonomists have found a way to empirically measure which Olympic mascot design is the most appealing to different audiences. 110 Taiwanese participants ranked random pairings of mascot designs in 14 categories (Subject-centered, Active, Attractive, Artistic, Unique, Cute, Striking, Creative, Regional, Energetic, Memorable, Merry, Symbolic, Modern). This data is then plotted endlessly. I highly recommend you download the PDF for the lulz.

But after all the charts, graphs, and statistical analysis, the stock closing gives us our one Memorable Quotation:

These results, based on a small sample, should be regarded only as a preliminary. Further studies involving more subjects and more mascots are necessary. Future works should examine the expression of mascot (Fig. 11), the design element of mascot (Fig. 12), and the motion of mascot (Fig. 13). (117)

Yes, further studies are necessary. Fingers crossed.  In the meantime, everyone joins in the parade!

ANSWERS:

Most popular: D, 7, 2

Least popular: 4, A, C, G

But the designers preferred 5 and 8, i.e. the drunk donkey and the schizoid cat. Well, go figger. 

Email me your favorite photoshopped...erm, favorite mascot at weirdresearch@gmail.com.

Imaginary Bad Breath

Apparently, it’s not always clear whether someone actually has bad breath, even to doctors. So things like this have been invented. Though note the Wikipedia page on the Halimeter®: it is “an adjunct method for determining halitosis (bad breath, oral malodor) levels, alongside human assessment of odor levels (the latter is considered the gold standard).” In other words, the nose knows. 

The pigeon isn't imagining anything. 

This brief (one-page) article from the renowned British Medical Journal is everything you ever did (not) want to know about the phenomenon of bad breath and its weird sister, imagined bad breath.

Real And Imaginary Halitosis

Author(s): Clifford Hawkins

Source: British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition), Vol. 294, No. 6566 (Jan. 24, 1987),pp. 200-201

Memorable Quotes: The first question to ask yourself when confronted with a patient who complains of bad breath is: "Can I smell it?" (200)

[I]maginary halitosis is worse than real halitosis for it can become an obsession that dominates the victim's life and turns him into a social outcast. (200)

[T]he flavoured belch of the aerophagist is usually pleasant and depends on the previous meal. (200)

[T]he breath can provide an invaluable clue to a doctor when faced with a patient first seen in coma: the fetor hepaticus of liver failure is like the smell of mice or a freshly opened corpse; uraemia produces a fishy ammoniacal smell; and diabetic coma an acetone odour like sweet apples or hay. (200-1)

Strange Findings: Those who imagine they have bad breath are likely to suffer from hypochondriasis, depression, temporal lobe epilepsy, or schizophrenia. (200)

“Morning breath” is an effect of there being little or no movement of the mouth and saliva during the night which cleanse the mouth during the day. (200)

They used to prescribe enemas for bad breath! (200) I wonder if that was why Gandhi enjoyed them...

If you rub garlic on your feet, you will get bad breath. Also, you will be kicked out of my house. (200)

Regular use of mouthwashes increases your risk for thrush and resistant strains of bacteria. (201) Reader beware: the link contains some gross pictures. 

If you find you may be suffering from actual bad breath, here's another Brit who weighs in on the matter. He's a dentist, so you know he's experienced. 

As always, you can get the full article in PDF form on Ziddu. 

Must There Always Be These Colors?: Hendrix and His Psychedelic Code

As Martin Mull (and many others) have said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." The journal Popular Music, then, is this. But it's filled with tons of weird articles. The recent issues have contained articles entitled "'This little ukulele tells the truth': indie pop and kitsch sensibility" and "'How do you know he's not playing Pac-Man while he's supposed to be DJing'?: technology, formats, and the digital future of DJ culture". But this post's article is particularly bizarre. The author argues that Jimi Hendrix's music is (at times) code for different types of psychedelic experience. 

Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of Jimi Hendrix

Author(s): Sheila Whiteley

Source: Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 37-60

Memorable Quotations: When the passage is played at half-speed on a tape-recorder, the word 'haze' in particular vibrates, dips and moves upwards to suggest a sense of fixation, and this particular effect is also present on 'funny' and 'sky' where the dip shapes create a strong feeling of floating around the beat. (45)

While 'Purple Haze' evokes a powerful acid experience, 'Mary' (marijuana) is a much milder drug and as such the gentler pacing of the song elicits a sense of complicity between Hendrix and the audience. (47)

The Wind Cries Mary' encodes the effect of marijuana through the gentleness and inner-directedness of its style. The timing is subtle, with the inflections in the melody line meandering just off-the-beat. In conjunction with the gentle drift of the key link motif :C:Bb:F the effect is one of easy well-being. The wind can blow anywhere, and the marijuana experience is universal. (49)

The author actually labels the part that is the 'trip'.

Hendrix's use of a conventional guitar, similar to that of Hank Marvin, but played upside down, can be read as a turning upside down the conventional world of such groups as The Shadows. (52)

In particular, the repetitive blues-like delivery of the coda in conjunction with the strongly bent-up chords moves towards an assertion of dominance and self-gratification which, in live performance, would have been intensified by the explicit masturbatory connotations of Hendrix's guitar style. (54)

'Foxy Lady' again focuses on a repetitive rhythmic motif: preceded by the highly charged 'give us some', the repeated 'foxy' symbolically moves to an expression of the rhythm of the sexual act itself. (58)

Strange Findings: Nothing you didn’t know already. Unless you didn’t know that Hendrix was the trippiest guitar player ever. 

You can get the full article here.

Inauguration, Ludic Reading, and Why Novels are Addictive

Welcome to Weird Research, a blog dedicated to collecting, reviewing, and lampooning actual, peer-reviewed research across all academic disciplines. The only criterion is that they must be weird. It does not matter if the weirdness is found in the methodology, the assumptions, the subject, the language, or the results. 

The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure: Needs and Gratifications

Author(s): Victor Nell

Source: Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 6-50

This unwieldy and weird study of “spontaneous pleasure reading,” also known as ludic reading apparently, has five (count ‘em) separate studies:

Reading for pleasure. Of course.

(1) reading ability and reading habits, (2) reader speed variability during natural reading, (3) reader rankings of books for preference, merit, and difficulty, (4) the physiology of ludic reading, and (5) the sovereignty of the reading experience. (6)

While it is not the weirdest of studies, it is a nice inauguration for the site because hopefully you will read this for pleasure. Spontaneously. And Victor Nell could not have guessed in his wildest dreams that any ludic reader may actually become “aroused” by his work.

Memorable Quotations: “[N]ewspaper and magazine readers are less dependent on their reading matter than book readers, who feel reading deprivation more keenly and take more vigorous action to end it. Perhaps the eighteenth-century critics were correct when they compared novel reading to tippling: Novels are addictive, whereas newspapers are not!” (14)

“[I]rrespective of career or language differences, females spend more time reading books than males; these differences carry over to other reading habit variables; and college males, of both language groups, read fewer books and for less time than the rest of the sample,” (14)

 “When the 33 ludic readers in this study were asked what percentage of their pleasure reading would be rated as "trash" by a suitably austere representative of elite culture, such as their high school English teacher, their mean rating was 42.6%,” (20-1).

“Clearly, substituting difficulty for literary merit is improper, and would lead to the conclusion that the poetry of T.S. Eliot and a Chevrolet workshop manual, being of equal difficulty, are of equal merit,” (30).

“The close association between difficulty and merit rankings supports the notion that these readers' value systems are under the sway of the Protestant ethic conviction that pain and virtue are allied,” (31).

“Ockert is the model for a gluttonous reader, a text gobbler who swallows books whole, achieving that pinnacle of gluttonous security, the ability to eat the same dish endlessly, pass- ing it through his system whole and miracu- lously wholesome, ready to be re-eaten again and again,” (42). 

I’m pretty sure that means he eats shit.

Strange Findings: Readers read the parts the like the slowest (18-9).

Our tastes are more likely to differentiate between groupings of books than actual works. (28)

Fill-in-the-blank tests (cloze tests) are bad. (32-3). Link your fifth-grade teacher to this post.

Bedtime reading has a physiological function. After getting excited by a book and then immediately putting it down and turning off the light, there is a “delightful” drop in “arousal, not only in skeletal muscle but also in skin potential, controlled by the autonomic nervous system,” (37-8).

Reading may be associated with salivation. (38)

How you read may be related to whether or not you can be hypnotized. (41) 

Well I hope you have enjoyed this first post and also that you are not salivating too much. The full article can be found here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/747903 Or download the file here: Ziddu.


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