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Yet more evidence showing that perceptions are often driven by unrecognized factors, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research (Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 294–308, Aug 2008) links personal and cultural values with taste. A given food can actually taste better when the eater believes the item represents values similar to their own

"Our present findings may have implications for efforts to promote better eating habits," write the authors. "Heavy meat eaters claim that they eat meat because it tastes better than other foods, such as meat substitutes. Our results challenge that claim. Participants who ate the vegetarian alternative did not rate the taste and aroma less favorably than those who ate the beef product. Instead, what influenced taste evaluation was what they thought they had eaten and whether that food symbolized values that they personally supported … strategies that might persuade heavy meat eaters to change their diet include changing the cultural associations of fruits and vegetables to encompass values that meat eaters endorse (e.g., power and strength), or challenging heavy meat eaters' assumptions about what tastes good by using in-store (blind) taste tests or showing them results of studies such as this one."

[Via Mind Hacks]

Watching Helen Fisher's TED talk on the brain in love is fascinating. She also has a great answer to those who think knowing too much about a thing ruins it's mystique. It's a much better response than I have for people asking if findout out too much about how we perceive art, in particular games, might ruin the experience.

People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. And I just simply say, "Hardly. You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake and then, when you sit down and eat that cake, you can still feel that joy."

"This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on," says Vanderbilt research associate, Joel Pearson, 'Mind's Eye' influences visual perception .

 

First, a person looks at a blank screen and imagines a green pattern. Next, she puts on the red-green glasses and looks at a screen with two superimposed patterns: one green and one red. The green pattern is visible to one eye and the red image is visible to the other eye. The longer she has spent imagining the green pattern, the more likely it is that she will see the green pattern, demonstrating that what people imagine can influence what they see later in time.

 

The American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) have posted, They Always Buy the Ten Cent Wine. In it they discuss the well-reported Ernest Gallo effect where the rating of wines change when subjects are made aware of pricing information, even when that information is bogus. Michael Veseth goes on to discuss the way in which retailers will organize their shelves.

 The physical act of taking the wine from the shelf mirrors the psychological choice you make — reach up for better (more expensive) wines, stoop down for the cheaper products. The principle will be the same in upscale supermarkets and discount stores but the choices (what price wine will be at the bottom, middle and top) will differ as you might expect.

 Exhilerating, exciting and a little frightening.

Below is a complete quote of a press release from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne:

Researchers from EPFL and Caltech have made an important neurobiological discovery of how humans learn to predict risk.  The research, appearing in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, will shed light on why certain kinds of risk, notably financial risk, are often underestimated, and whether abnormal behavior such as addiction (e.g. to gambling or drugs) could be caused by an erroneous evaluation of risk.

 

Planning entails making predictions. In an uncertain environment, however, our predictions often don't pan out. And erroneous prediction of risk often leads to unusual behaviour: euphoria or excessive gambling when risk is underestimated, and panic attacks or depression when we predict that things are riskier than they really are. To understand these anomalous reactions to uncertain situations, we need to look to the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie how we learn to predict risk. Surprisingly little research has been done in this topic, and we do not yet know precisely how the brain is involved in our estimation of risk.

 

Using functional imaging in a simple gambling task in which risk was constantly changed, the researchers discovered that an early activation of the anterior insula of the brain was associated with mistakes in predicting risk. The time course of the activation also indicated a role in rapid updating, suggesting that this area is involved in how we learn to modify our risk predictions. The finding was particularly interesting, notes lead author and EPFL professor Peter Bossaerts, because the anterior insula is the locus of where we integrate and process emotions.

 

"This represents an important advance in our understanding of the neurological underpinnings of risk, in analogy with an earlier discovery of a signal for forecast error in the dopaminergic system," says Bossaerts, "and indicates that we need to update our understanding of the neural basis of reward anticipation in uncertain conditions to include risk assessment."

 

Contrary to what Descartes held dear, the finding that risk prediction and processing of emotions are related suggests that emotions may be intimately involved in rational decision making -- they may help us to correctly assess risk in an uncertain world.

People commonly believe in luck and that it comes in streaks. Even when presented with totally random sequences, we can infer patterns where none exist. A recent report shows that after a result is repeated three times in a row, people tend to see a streak of luck. They see nothing special about two, and nothing more significant about runs of more than three. A summary of the paper can be found at the BPS Research Digest.

The secrets of play lay somewhere deep. The best book on animal play is Gordon Burghardt's The Genesis of Animal Play. But a great presentation, by Stuart Brown of The National Institute for Play, shows cross-species play in action: a wild polar bear and a husky playing together.

According to a study in the September 1 issue of SLEEP, Mathias Basner of Penn found work time to have the largest impact on the duration of our sleep. Coming in at #2 was travel time, including our commutes.

According to the results, most waking activities were inversely related to sleep time. The largest reciprocal relationship to sleep on both weekdays and weekends was found for work time. Respondents who slept four-and-a-half hours or less worked an average of 93 minutes more on weekdays and 118 minutes more on weekends than the average sleeper, while those who slept 11-and-a-half hours or more worked an average of 143 minutes less on weekdays and 71 minutes less on weekends than the average sleeper.

 

“These cross-sectional results in a nationally representative sample suggest that compensated work time is the most potent determinant of sleep time, in which case work time should be considered an important factor when evaluating the relationship between sleep time and morbidity and mortality,” said Dr. Basner.

I'm unsure how, but apparently I forgot to post Dan Gilbert's TED talk. I went to show it to some folks after a mention of his book Stumbling on Happiness. Here he is, talking about our poor ability to judge what will and will not make us happy.

Been busy. But, in the midst, some feedback from a Carcassonne fanatic let us know that both River expansions are missing a monastery! We are working on a patch to fix this ASAP and I apologize to those fans that are missing them.

There's a hot story from Standford showing that Preschoolers prefer carrots from a McDonald's bag to carrots from a generic bag. It doesn't matter that the restaurant doesn't serve or market carrots. Just the very association with the McD brand is enough to elicit a preference.

"Kids don't just ask for food from McDonald's," said Thomas Robinson, MD, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Packard Children's and associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at the School of Medicine. "They actually believe that the chicken nugget they think is from McDonald's tastes better than an identical, unbranded nugget."

The degree of preference expressed by the children correlated with the number of television sets they had in their homes and the frequency with which they ate at McDonald's.

 

My pal Rodd sent me the link to the research article: Effects of Fast Food Branding on Young Children's Taste Preferences. 

At Assembly 07, (rumor has it, 14 year old) tejeez made this 3rd place entrant in the short film competition. Just awesome.

Another study in the Journal of Consumer Research (which is using some kind of Jedi mind trick to make me really want to subscribe at US$190... almost) describes the "perceptual focus effect."

...the authors show how grouping together [visually] options with similar characteristics can emphasize dissimilar options and help them pop-out. For example, consider a comparison of two sofas, A and B. Sofa A has softer cushions; Sofa B is more durable. In a head-to-head comparison, sofa A is preferred by less than half of the survey participants – 42.3 percent.

However, if sofas A and B are grouped with three other sofas, all of which have a low rating for cushion softness, then preference for sofa A jumps to 77.4 percent. One of these things is not like the others, and that apparently makes it more desirable – a phenomenon the authors term “perceptual focus effect.”...


...The researchers also found that how consumers process information can influence how susceptible they are to perceptual focus effect. Those who rely on intuition are more likely to choose a perpetually focal option. In addition, having participants perform an analytical test before making a product choice drained logical reasoning resources and increased the likelihood that the person would choose the perpetually focal option.

Wanna see something really scary? Well apparently, according to "On the Consumption of Negative Feelings" in the August 2007 Journal of Consumer Research , you might.

How can the hedonistic assumption (i.e., people's willingness to pursue pleasure and avoid pain) be reconciled with people choosing to expose themselves to experiences known to elicit negative feelings? We assess how (1) the intensity of the negative feelings, (2) positive feelings in the aftermath, and (3) the coactivation of positive and negative feelings contribute to our understanding of such behavior. In a series of four studies, consumers with either approach or avoidance tendencies (toward horror movies) were asked to report their positive and/or negative feelings either after (experiment 1) or while (experiments 2, 3A, and 3B) they were exposed to a horror movie. We demonstrate how a model incorporating coactivation principles and enriched with a protective frame moderator (via detachment) can provide a more parsimonious and viable description of the affective reactions that result from counterhedonic behavior.

The research would seem evidence for the view [which I share] that people are capable of experiencing both negative and positive feelings simultaneously and that some amount of detachment allows people to enjoy otherwise "unpleasurable" experiences.

You can read the press release after the jump.