Agression And Uniform Color

In 1988, researchers Mark Frank and Thomas Gilovich from Cornell assessed the self- and social perception of wearing a black uniform in professional sports. In our culture we would all agree that the good guys always wear white, and the bad guys always wear black. A classic film from 1977 reflects this concept well:

Han solo, always the badass,
incorporates both black and white.

This is not to say film or media is responsible for such concepts, they simply mirror our cultural norms and values. The perception of white = pure, black = evil is heavily integrated into our western culture; all one has to do is inspect just about any Christian piece of artwork ever made. Previous research has shown that Caucasian subjects asked to make semantic differential ratings of colors associated black with evil, death, and sadness (Williams & McMurty, 1970).

Frank and Gilovich set off to see if professional hockey and football teams that wear black uniforms were more aggressive than their counterparts. The operational definition of "black uniform" meaning over half of the colored parts of the uniform being black,  and "aggressive" being how much the teams were penalized in their respective sport. Twenty-five subjects unfamiliar with hockey and football were outfitted with the task of differentiating each teams' uniform. Cues to outside references, such as the teams' hometowns were removed when necessary and\or possible. All of the black uniforms were rated to be much more "bad", "mean", and "aggressive" than other uniforms in the league. The black NFL uniforms were perceived as being "stronger" than their non-black counterparts, however this was not the case for black NHL uniforms!

From Wikipedia and NHLUniforms, here are the ten team uniforms that were used in the study. (As long as the current uniforms are similar to the 1988 uniforms, I did not seek out images of the exact original NFL designs. For example, the Bengals had solid stripes on their sleeves in 1988, instead of today's tiger stripes.)

Stealers

 
Saints

Raiders

Bengals

Bears (While technically dark-blue, The Bear's uniform is very often perceived as black.)

Canaucks

Penguins

Flyers

Blackhawks

Bruins

(Frank & Gilovich, 1970)

The researchers found that in record archives from 1970 to 1986, teams with uniforms which matched the definition of "black" were penalized more in penalty minutes (for hockey) and yards (for football) than average. 1970 being selected as the cut-off date as it was the year the NFL merged with the AFL. A significant difference in penalties was also recorded when teams switched over to black uniforms; the years teams in the NHL wore "non-black" uniforms were counted in the non-black sample. As the title suggests, there are two reasons given for this: 1) Social perception, referees making biased decisions against the "bad" teams.
2) Self-perception resulting in increased aggression on part of the players. The teams with black uniforms were also ranked highest on a malevolence scale (as part of the subjects' questionnaire)! The one exception being The New Jersey Devils being ranked fourth in the NHL. It is also interesting to note that the teams ranked the least malevolent by subjects were teams that had cool green or blue uniform colors: The Hartford Whalers, Quebec Nordiques, Toronto Maple Leafs, Washington Capitols (red, white, and blue), St. Louis Blues, The Miami Dolphins, Houston Oilers, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, and Detroit Lions were the bottom five teams ranked on malevolence for the NHL and NFL, respectively.

However, the researchers also provide another explanation. Perhaps the management of teams want their teams to play more aggressively as a strategy to win, and therefore management specifically hired aggressive players; the bow on the team being the uniform the team is draped in, sporting a psychologically aggressive color... BLACK.  George Carlin's, "Baseball or Football" sketch comes to mind, and after all, football and hockey are both contact sports. Being aggressive and strong are both ideas you would want to communicate to the other players. This suggestion is certainly worth considering for the Raiders, who in the 1970s and 80s had a notoriously vicious defencive line.

In order to see if referees might have some sort of bias against teams in black uniforms, the researchers went on to form another study where subjects watched staged games of football with white and black uniformed teams. The subjects were asked to rate the defensive team in certain plays. At the end of the study, subjects were more likely to penalize a black uniformed defensive team than a white uniformed defensive team even though it was the exact same gameplay footage with altered color. In a final study presented in the paper, the researchers had male Cornell students compete in a set of games of their choosing, with the opposing teams given white and black uniforms. Those teams given black uniforms were more likely to select more aggressive games, such as chicken fights (as opposed to block stacking), however these results were not statistically significant.

These results lead to some interesting questions. Will you be perceived as being "evil" or "aggressive" by your peers, or even yourself for wearing black clothing? Or perhaps you would be an aggressive person in general, and then as a result select more "intimidating" clothing. Such an issue is age old in psychology, the nature vs. nurture question. I am sure more research has been conducted in this area since this study from 1988. If any of you dear readers know of any follow up studies, please go to the contact page above or leave a comment. 

Article:
Frank, Mark G., and Gilovich, Thomas, "The Dark Side of Self- and SocialPerception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports",Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1988, 54:1:74-85

Perspectives on Inference

            The following paper was submitted by me as a final project for a Hampshire College cognitive science course. It has been edited into a second draft, and has also been edited and formatted significantly from its original version for pulication on this site.

            Numbers never lie is a phrase etched into our collective minds at a young age. Unfortunately this could not be further from the truth, especially in regards to statistics. In fact, one professor went as far to say that statistics is often classified as a subcategory of lying. (Moore 1985). As powerful tools of inference, statistical tests are able to give us insights from the data we collect about the world around us. However, these insights are generalizations and are open into interpretation; just as a translation can only ever be an interpretation, statistical results are also only interpretations of data and variables.

            Before this paper begins, it is important to start with a disclaimer. By no means am I stating that the statistical inferences we have today are the “begin and end all” of data assessment. If anything, they are just another perspective to assimilate data and makes the data easier to “work” with. For instance, the student’s T-test is much more conservative in terms of data analysis than the z test, although there is criterion for using each; even then this criterion can be vague. One textbook I have states that you should use the z-test when you have a sample size under 30 (Diez, 2012). But this is by no means a standardized rule, and can be up to the researcher’s discretion.  

            As a result of this amalgamation of what statistics can mean, different groups of people have different ways of perceiving their intended use and for the layperson, the media, students, and academics, statistics analysis have very different meanings. I would like to explore what these perceptions are. Before that, I would also like to present some ways in which statistics can be altered in malicious ways in order to suit the needs of a researcher. While not the only ways one can be dishonest in academic literate, doing so will demonstrate how easy such feats can be.            
            A very simply way one could change their statistically insignificant results to statistically significant results would be to change their one tailed test to a two tailed test. Doing so would lover the p-value (the probability of getting your result if the null hypothesis is true) of your result, possibly changing the outcome of your study. This is dishonest because you need to start off with a good reason as to why you are using a one or two-tailed test, One–tailed tests are for studies where we know that there will be no sort of adverse result, or studies where we are not interested in that result for a valid reason. For example, if we were testing the effects of meditation on blood pressure, we would not expect meditation to increase a subject’s blood pressure. As a result, your alpha level (where one’s p-value needs to fall in order to reject the null) is only on one side of a distribution and would be five percent. However, if we were to test some sort of new way for students to study, we would want to see if our independant variable increased or decreased subbects' scores Therefore we would 

(Different image used for online article, image from The heritiage foundation.)

split the 0.05 alpha level between the two tails of the distribution, so that it is now 0.025. If we were to run our "new study method" experiment, and at the end we get a p-value of 0.033; if we decided that we wanted to change our study to a one-tail experiment, this would be dishonest.
            One of a more obvious way to misinterpret statistics is to literally change the perspective of the visual representation of your data. In the following example, the samples closest to us would be considered larger, because they appear larger.

(Chartingcontrol.com)

A verbal example of the same phenomena would be how you expressed your figure. Would you like to say that you had a one percent return on sales, a fifteen percent return on investment, a ten-million dollar profit, or a sixty percent decrease from last year (Huff, 1954)? This topic alone could be covered in volumes (such as the one just cited), however I am trying to show that there are many different ways one can misrepresent, and misinterpret statistical information. One could write multiple papers as well on each of these subjects (performing logical fallacies, such as asking loaded questions, throwing out data, manipulating data, have biased samples, etcetera). I just wanted to show how one can present data in such a way that it would appear to be justified to an uninformed reader.

            There are many real world examples of studies that misrepresent their data or have had their data misrepresented by others, whether it was an accident or just a simple mistake. Duncan MacDougall’s attempt to find the weight of the human soul in the twentieth century is something that has entered Americans’ minds as a faucet of pop-science. While MacDougall reported that the human soul might have an average weight of about twenty-one grams. The truth is that his methodology was seriously lacking. MacDougall only had a sample size of six, two of which were discarded, with the rest there was trouble with determining the exact time of death. The weight of subjects often fluctuated after death, and contemporaries of the time provided a laundry list of physiologically plausable alternitive reasons as to why the subjects would have lost weight (Evans, 1947). Never the less, MacDougall continued his research and his results found no difference in weight with dying dogs.

            Still today, MacDougall’s research is something I have been told by others with conviction is a scientific fact. I personally have had a high-school history teacher relate this faux factoid to us. “A scientist once measured the human soul” she began. A few students backed her up, they too had heard about the doctor who was able to weigh the human soul and that because he was a scientist, there was some validity to the point being made. While this example is mostly harmless, being confined to everyday “did you know?” situations, misinterpreted studies can become toxic in the realm of news media.

Take the television show Ancient Aliens as another example many should be familiar with. While there is virtually no manipulation of statistics in the show, there is vast falsifying of information and misinterpretation of current archeologist evidence making such absurd claims such as the pyramids were carved out of lasers, and ancient peoples having the ability to build aircrafts (Heiser, 2012). An example more related to Neuroscience and statistics would the studies on average brain size often distributed by ignorant racists to support their beliefs that certain races of people are more intelligent. With the cited papers (an example would be: Witelson, 2005), these racists claim that other races have smaller brains, and then insinuate that this somehow means they must be less intelligent. Besides the fact that the results of the study provided; many others like it are almost always either insignificant or too vague to come to a solid conclusion, it is still a red herring to say that brain size is related to or correlated with intelligence. However, this is not an inference that an average layperson may make, and they could be led to believe that certain bigoted viewpoints have some sort of validity. Here is a different example from May of this year (2012 at the time of submission), CNBC reported a story with the headline “The Inflation of Life, The Cost of Raising a Child Has Soared" (CNBC). The article states that the cost of raising a child has raised 25%. What they don’t state is that this can be reflected in ten years of inflation (Olitsky, 2012).

Students are also prone to these mistakes. Any person who spends some time in a psychology class is eventually bound to hear something along the lines of “Therefore this study proved X”. I am not accusing these students of being malicious, and it would be unfair to hold them to the same standard that we should the media, specifically news outlets and a television channel that claims to have history as the primary subject matter. This may partially be due to the fact that statistics are rarely taught outside of higher education, and even then statistics may not be offered or required outside of certain programs. One may argue as to why a high-school student or English major would need to take statistics, but when statistics are used every day, it is important for a more general understanding of what they mean, and how they are used.

We can take a step further and examine who exactly are teaching these statistics course. The author of the book Sense and Nonsense of Statistical Inference, Chamont Wang, claims that many researchers do not even understand the statistical methods they are applying. He cites a paper that approximated half of the articles published in medical journals at the time used statistical methods incorrectly (Wang, 1993. Glantz, 1980). And at this level of academic research, a major problem is conflict of interest. Many professors are in a situation where they are pressured to publish significant research in order to keep their jobs. Deemed “publish or perish” this environment  is lethal for the integrity of science as it puts many academics in situations where they can easily manipulate their data in order to just keep their jobs, or to continue funding. A simple Google search of “scientific misconduct” will yield thousands of studies that have been deemed invalid or fraudulent in the last decade alone.

In closing, there are an exhausting number of ways to misrepresent data, and what has been presented here is a brief overview that does not even being to scratch the surface of misinterpreting statistics. I would have liked to expanded more and more on each one of these subjects provided, but I don’t know if I would have known when to stop. While this paper has been rather bleak, I would like to note that one of the beautiful things about science is that it is always open for discussion and criticism, and with due time we may hopfully be able to cast out instances of bad research as examples of what is naught to be done.

Works Cited

Ancient Aliens Debunked. Dir. Mike Heiser. N.p., 30 Sept. 2012. Web. 5 Dec. 2012.

Diez, David M., Christopher D. Barr, and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel. OpenIntro Statistics. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2012. Print.

Evans, Bergen. The Natural History of Nonsense,. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1947. Print.

Glantz, S. A. (1980). Biostatistics: How to Detect, Correct and Prevent Errors in The Medical Literature. Vol. 61, 1-7.

Huff, Darrell, and Irving Geis. How to Lie with Statistics. New York: Norton, 1954. Print.

Introduction to SAS.  UCLA: Statistical Consulting Group. (accessed December 5, 2012).

Moore, David S. Statistics: Concepts and Controversies. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1985. Print.

Olitsky, Morris. "Misuse of Statistics a National Problem. Amstat News, 1 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2012. .

Pie3d. N.d. Photograph. Charting Control. Chartin Control. 2012. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.

"The Inflation of Life - Cost of Raising a Child Has Soared." Yahoo! Finance. CNBC, 7 May 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.

Wang, Chamont. Sense and Nonsense of Statistical Inference: Controversy, Misuse, and Subtlety. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1993. Print.

Witelson, S. F. "Intelligence and Brain Size in 100 Postmortem Brains: Sex, Lateralization and Age Factors." Brain 129.2 (2005): 386-98. Print.

Oktrends

The statistics nerds over at the dating site Okcupid run a blog called Oktrends where they crunch their user data into really interesting posts. For example: Using a physical compliment in you frist message to someone brings down the odds that they will reply. In this case, using the word "pretty" as an adjective makes it a physical compliment, but as an adverb it works as just another word.

Graph shows reply rate of messsages containin the listed
keywords, plotted against the average reply rate of 32%
(This image belongs to OKcupid)

Pretty cool! Earlier in the year, Okcupid was updating Oktrends every few months, now however their last update has not been since April. (If by a miracle any of the Okcupid researchers out there read this, please start updating Oktrends again! Also I love you.)

Of course these results are only true for people who use Okcupid. Therefore we can only say that on average there are more twenty year old female Okcupid users that enjoy rough sex than any other age group. It is also important to not mix correlation and causation, but there's a whole book for that.

The fact that they do this makes me glad that Okcupid is somewhat transparent about what they are doing with user's personal information. Imagine the kind of correlations Facebook must discover (and not share with their users)? I really cannot suggest a single article, because they are all fascinating. If you haven't already, go and check it out. And let me know if you know of any other sites out there like this.

Bee Domestication

This article is one big paraphrase of a paper I wrote for a class I took with Mark Feinstein at Hampshire College called Cognition in Domesticated Animals in 2012. I highly recommend to course to anyone if it is still offered. For the sake of the audience I have cut down the length of the original paper. However I have also added extra information on domestication in order to contextualize some of the information provided. If there are any glaring problems with this article, please contact me. I have also maintained all of the citations in case you are interested in reading more about this topic. Where information was added I included a link for further information or the full citation in the text.

Bees communicate the location of flowers and food by "dancing". Wikipedia now has a great, well cited article on this behavior. This was first noted by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch in his book Die Tanzsprache der Bienen (English: The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees). Today our understanding of how bees communicate through "dancing" is much more better understood and documented. The direction of the bees' "dance" is in direct relation to the hive and the position of the sun in the sky. It is mostly believed that bees interpret another bee's dancing as s worker honey bee’s brain contains about 850,000 cells, half of which belong to the occipital lobe (half their brain is used for vision.) (Menzel 191 - 201). Vision is incredibly important for bees in general, and like birds, they can see ultraviolet light.  Recent research shows that bees cannot communicate this way in the dark. We also now know that the duration of the part of the dance where the bee moves a certain way (zigzags) signifies distance of the location in question.

15,000 year old cave painting
found in Valencia, Spain.

Humans and bees have always coexisted as far as we know. Before beekeeping, hunter-gathers would climb trees in order to retrieve honey from nests. Wall paintings showing this behavior have been found in countries on different continents across the globe including Zimbabwe, China, and Spain. The presence of these artifacts across the world suggests that the means by which people collected honey from bees developed convergently around the same time in different societies. One wall painting in Spain shows how humans would put giant ladders against trees in order to climb up and collect the honey. In Thailand permanent ladders made out of bamboo would be installed into the trees in order to access the honey bees’ nests (Oldroyd 213). In Vietnam, Apis Dorsata honeybees were kept in rafters. African tribes would, and still do, create artificial “hives” out of suspended wood logs, which could be placed near a dwelling. Hieroglyphics show us that the Egyptians kept hives in clay pots, as did the Greeks.  Later, in the seventeenth century, the Greeks started using wicker hives instead of clay. Meanwhile the Romans had a type of hive made of wicker, oak, and dung. When the Romans invaded Briton around 45 AD, they brought the practice of beekeeping with them.

Aristotle was one of the first people to write about the inner workings of beehives. Pliny the Elder documented that The Romans were likely the first to develop transparent hives from horn of lantern and "mirror stone" to study bees. Virgil too wrote concerning bees and where to place apiaries. He was the first to document that there was a class structure within a bees nest. Some oversights made was that he assumed the queen bee was a king. He also remarked that pollen stuck to bees in order to act as a ballast for when they flew. Some countries today such as Oman and Yemen still refer to the Queen Bee as a sheik, meaning they consider it a male (Free 100). 

When we start thinking about domestication, we need to think about what that word really means. Is it something that we can measure? Today we know that some animals can be tamed and others cannot. That there are some animals that could have been tamed, but are very much wild. Plenty of people have barn cats for example. But what does the process of domestication look like over history and how did it develop? In this case it's best to talk about dogs since they're the best example when it comes to domestication.

One of the theories that have been suggested as an explanation for the domestication of dogs is self domestication. Dogs that had a smaller flight distance (the measurable distance a person could get to a dog before it runs away) would eat food scraps from neolithic "garbage dumps" humans were making. This reduce in flight distance may be the result of an altered state of brain chemistry, which in turn would affect other behaviors. For example: while humans would eventually select and breed for specific behavioral and physical traits in dogs, there would be other measurable traits that would not initially be accounted for; the size of a domesticated dog's skull and brain is on average smaller than their wild type (Serpell, James (1995). The Domestic Dog; its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. p. 35. ). It is important to delineate that a bigger brain does not make a smarter brain.

Further examples of differences between domesticated animals and their wild types::

This strange link between coat color and temperament stems from a relationship between pigment production, hormones, and neurochemistry. It is not the case that coat color causes a difference in temperament, but rather that certain physiological processes underlie facets of both coat color and behavior. In particular, the hormones and neurotransmitters involved in the stress response and other behaviors are closely integrated with pigment production.
For example, the neurotransmitter dopamine and the hormones noradrenaline and adrenaline, which are involved in the stress response, have the same biochemical precursor as the melanin pigments (Anonymous 1971, Ferry and Zimmerman 1964). In addition, dopamine directly influences pigment production by binding to the pigment-producing cells (Burchill et al. 1986). Dopamine indirectly influences pigment production by inhibiting pituitary melanotropin, also known as melanocyte stimulating hormone (MSH), which is responsible for stimulating pigment cells to produce pigment (Tilders and Smelik 1978).
Therefore, by breeding only the most docile animals in a group, humans select for physiological changes in the animal's hormonal and neurochemical systems, changes that impact morphology and physiology -- including fur color. A change in fur color during domestication may therefore be an incidental byproduct of selection for tameness.

It is therefore suggested that more tame domesticated animals have less melanin:

The character Mongo riding a tame, mostly white bull in the film Blazing Saddles.

 We also need to think about how we view the bee. A single honeybee cannot exist without the hive. The word eusocial has been used to describe their complex hierarchical behavior, and the beehive has been described as operating as a “super organism" - that is that the hive itself is seen a single organism itself. Due to the beehive existing as a single organism, and early man’s misconception as to how bees mated, it was tough for one to directly or artificially select for the right honey bees due to the fact that so many of their behavioral traits are linked to social interaction (Menzel 27). There are many different definitions of what it mean to be conscious. My personal definition is that to be conscious is to understand that you are a separate entity to the world around you. This means that I consider dogs that don't freak out at their reflection in a mirror as possibly being conscious. It means that I don't find individual bees as having consciousness, but I do see bee hives as being self-conscious. Alternatively, individual humans are conscious, but a physical group of people is very much not conscious. I also use the terms consciousness and self-awareness interchangeably. If you'd like to know more about super organisms, the book The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies is an excellent resource.

There are similar measurable traits found in honey bees versus other bees that are not used for honey production. The honey bee was are familiar with in North America is specifically the Italian honey bee, Apis Mellifer which European settlers brought with them in 1859. It has been suggested by sources that the Italian honey bee was selected out of all the honey bees for a verity of reasons: they occupy less space in the nest, they swarm less than even other honey bee species, they are more adaptable to other climates, and most importantly; they produce more honey than other honey bee species (Frank, et el.; 2000). Compared to their wild-types, honeybees initially produced a honey that was edible. Some wasps, such as the polistinae wasp (paper wasp) produce honey that can be poisonous to human. Over time bee were bread to select for quality of honey; texture, color, and a final product that is free of brood are all important factors (Free, 124).

The missing traits are that there are no current data or research suggesting that honey bees have smaller brains than their “wild” counterparts, or are whiter in color. This brings up a lot of interesting questions pertaining to our relationships with different classes of animals, and how that physically affects them. Bees absolutely do have hormones, so what is different about insects or bees where we wouldn't see the same changes in them over time? 

Today beekeepers are able to even more granularly select for desired traits by removing larva from their cells in the hive and placing them in “queen cups” where they can then be introduced into another colony. There are many more aspects today that beekeepers know to control for. “Cleaning behavior” which is the removing of damaged larva, and debris from the nest. Grooming is also important; this is the removing of mites from the bees themselves. A foreign mite introduced from another bee species has the potential to wipe out a whole race of bees. Bees stealing honey from other hives is another behavior that one beekeeper reports, and supposedly can be controlled for (Cushman). It's completely possible some beekeepers in the past know to select for these traits, but no such record of doing so has been found. Nest size is another factor that may have been selected for in bees. Considering more bees mean more honey, solitary bees are never used for honey cultivation. A healthy honey bee nest can have anywhere from 50,000 to 60,000 bees (World Book Encyclopedia; 154 - 161). Compare to a paper wasp nest, which can house around 5,000 wasps (Strassman). Due to the fact the nests are smaller and wasps are carnivores, they do not produce as much honey as a honey bee. Wasps also construct their nests out of paper instead of wax, which is less useful for human consumption.

[There was a section here on what might be causing colony collapse. Pesticides still continue to be believed to be the leading cause. New research also shows that moths at night play an integral role in pollenization.]

A bee on a yellow Rudbeckia hirta flower.

The pain score for honey bees on several different scales tends to fall in the middle. On the Starr Sting Scale of Pain, insects in the Apidae genus all score a two on a scale of one to four (Starr; 1985). On the Schmidt Sting Pain Index honey bees once again score a two out of four; alongside yellow jackets and wasps. The paper wasp scores a four on the Schmidt scale. However honey bees are less aggressive than wasps. Honeybees also die after stinging you, while other bees do not. For those who have been fortunate enough to never experience it, wasps bite and sting at the same time. This could have to do with the fact that honey bees consume nectar, while wasps are carnivores and therefore have to hunt and fight to survive. Online sources suggest that the bee stinger has evolved through fighting between bees, however all of these sites cite an outsourced Wikipedia article.

The Africanized honey bee for example may have adapted its aggressive behavior from having to protect their nests from predators in their environment; possums, bears, badgers, jackals and other predators that would destroy their nest. Sure enough, one of the biggest threats to bee keepers is bears destroying their nests. At UMASS the only bee hive we had that didn't get destroyed by a bear was on the roof of a building. The climate of Africa also means that the Africanized bees are more tailored to harsher climate with less water. Due to this reason, Africanized bees have been able to easily travel outside of their habitat, much to the discontent of the people who come into contact with them. Beekeepers in Brazil have successfully been able to breed Africanized bees into their apiaries and over time, select for less aggression (Tew). The only major difference between Africanized bee and honey bees is that the Africanized bees are more aggressive, and will pursue a perceived threat for a longer distance (Tew).

Right now there may not be much physical evidence of the bees being domesticated, but I think that more research needs to be done looking at hives rather than individual bees themselves. Nevertheless it seems that, compared to their wild types, the “domestic” bees are much more docile. Comparison of the brain size and density of honey bees to wasps and their Africanized counterparts would prove to be interesting. 

 
Sources:
"Bee." World Book Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. Chicago: Feild Enterprises Educational Corporation, 1973. 154-61. Print.

Cushman, Dave. "Honey Bee Colony Assessment Criteria." Beekeeping & Bee Breeding. 10 May 2005. Web. 9 May 2011. <http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/assessmentcriteria.html>.

Frank, P., L. Garnery, G. Celebrano, M. Solignac, and J.-M. Cornuet. "Hybrid Origins of Honeybees from Italy (Apis Mellifera Ligustica) and Sicily (A. M. Sicula)." Molecular Ecology 9.7 (2000): 907-21. Print.

Free, John B. Bees and Mankind. London: Allen and Unwin, 1982. Print.

Hunt, James H., Anthony M. Rossi, Nels J. Holmberg, Samuel R. Smith, and William R. Sherman. "Nutrients in Social Wasp Honey." Physiology, Biochemistry and Toxicology 91.4 (1998). < http://www.umsl.edu/~huntj/Number%2064.pdf >.

Menzel, Randolf, and Alison Mercer. Neurobiology and Behaviour of Honeybees. Berlin. Springer, 1987. Print.

Oldroyd, Benjamin P. (2007). "What's Killing American Honey Bees?". PLoS Biology 5 (6): <http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1892840.>

Oldroyd, Benjamin P., Siriwat Wongsiri, and Thomas D. Seeley. "Asian Honey Bees: Biology, Conservation, and Human Interactions." Harvard University Press. Print.

Ramirez, M., E. Rivera, and C. Ereuc. "Fifteen Cases of Atropine Poisoning after Honey Ingestion." Vetinary and Human Toxicology 41.1 (1999): 19-20. Print.

Starr, Christopher K. "Pain Scale for Field Comparison of Hymenopteran Stings." Journal of Entomology 20.2 (1985): 225-32. Web. 10 May 2011. <http://www.ckstarr.net/cks/1985-PAIN.pdf>.

Strassmann, Joan E. "Social Behavior of Polistine Wasps." Rice University Web. Rice University, 1 Nov. 2006. Web. 9 May 2011. <http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~evolve/Waspweb/wasphome.html>.

Tew, James E. "Africanized Honey." Ohioline. Ohio State University. Web. 9 May 2011. <http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2124.html>.

Using Visual Accessing Cues For Better Memorization

In 1985 there was a PHD thesis published researching the use of the same visual eye movements that are used in NLP to tell wither or not somebody is lying. Rather than use the eye movements to read the body language of a subject, the researcher had subjects utilize these same strategies in order to help memorization of how to spell words.

This article references information in a previous article I wrote on visual accessing cues. If you are not familiar with this technique, I suggest reading the article in the second link above, or clicking here.

This research falls under cognitive strategies, which as the name suggests; are learning, and thinking strategies we can use to increase mental performance, and memory. Another paper from the University of Utah defines these strategies, which differ somewhat person-to-person, as personal strategies: 

"A strategy is an ordered sequence of cognitive behavioral experiences that is repeated in the same or similar contexts. An experience is personal, so must strategies be. For example, when I tie my shoelaces in the morning, there is a sequence of experiences--mostly of the small muscle sensations and skin pressures in my fingers--that are repeated from past shoe-tying contexts. Even though million of people tie their shoes every day, the exact sequence of my experiences, probably slightly different from anyone else's, must occur for me personally if my shoes are to be tied."

 The reason why these strategies are personal is because not every strategy works for everyone. It is important to provide people (or more specifically, children who don't know how to tie their shoes) with pictures, stories ("make the bunny ears"), and demonstrations of how to tie a knot. As these children learn, they also develop internal representations of what a knot is. Therefore it would make sense that remembering what a knot looks like, visualizing a knot, or saying the steps of tying a knot out loud ("a rabbit comes out of the hole, goes around the tree...") would all help in remembering how to tie your shoe. The example the paper gives is that when experienced spellers try to spell a non-phonetic word, such as "Albuquerque"; they will visualize the word, and then spell it out based off of their mental image of the word.

In both these tests, the results were almost identical. In the Loiselle test All the subjects were given a spelling "pretest". Group A was simply told to "learn the words", and scored same as the pretest. Group B was told to "visualize the words as a method of learning them", and scored 10% better. Group C was told to "look up to the left", which NLP claims helps visual memory, and scored 20-25% better! A further group, Group D, were told to "look down to the right" (kinesthetic, and internal dialogue), but may hinder visualizing. People in this group scored 15% worse than pretest.

In the Malloy test the visualization spelling strategy produced a 25 percent improvement in spelling ability (and 100% retention) compared to no change in a control group but that spellers told to visualize when looking "down to the left" (kinesthetic feeling) scored around 10% worse.

Of course these studies only suggest that these techniques would only help with spelling. Although I seriously doubt that this only applies to spelling. Nevertheless, this research opens the door for all types of other questions. Would looking down and to the left or right (kniestethic) help with typing correctly on a blank keyboard? Or would it not help because even though typing is a physical activity, it is still a memorization task? Does looking down/right affect spelling performance any more or less then looking down/left? IS the eye movement simply a memory cue that helps with memorization, and if so why do people who look down perform worse on the tests?

Applicable Learning

This book was cited in another book I was reading. I originally thought it was going to be an academic article that I could read in under an hour, but now that it's a whole book, and with my giant reading list this summer; it will take some time before I get to read the whole thing.

One of the points made by this book, as well as an academic article by Steinke is on how figuring out ways to apply the material you are trying to learn is more useful to the learner than memorization (full source and citation at the bottom of this post). This is because you are thinking critically and using problem solving:

"As a pedagogy, service-learning inherently teaches the kind of thinking skills and knowledge application necessary for success outside academia."

For this reason it is always important to think about how something is applicable when you are learning it, especially if you have a terrible professor. "How is this equation important or useful to something I might do?", "Why am I learning this?"  And "Is this course work important for what I want to do after school?" are all important questions to ask yourself time to time. If you can't answer these question, it might be time to reevaluate your academic priorities.

Steinke, Pamela. "Assessing Service-Learning." Research & Practice in Assessment 1.2 (2007): 1-8. Penn State. Web. 23 May 2011.

Um... Uh... Er....

One of the guys I follow is Graham over at My Views on Science and News who pulls up articles from science news sites. A post he recently made was about a a study concerning persuasive speech conducted at the University of Michigan. I got really excited because I thought the science direct article would mention why the disfluency "um" was in the title. It wasn't, but it peaked my interest and now I want to write about it.

Filled pauses, or disfluencies (think uh um ah thee... etc.) can give us inferences in what the speaker is saying. There's many different examples of this but my favorite is one the was shown in the paper If You Say thee uh You Are Describing Something Hard. Which makes the argument that disfluencies are encountered because the speaker is planing a new utterance, describing something difficult, or is being distracted. I cannot directly link it to you, but if you have a college or university log in you might have access to it on one of the journal websites. You can find the full citation at the bottom of this page.

Here's how the experiment worked. If I take a native English speaker and hook them up to an eye tracking machine, while showing them a picture like this on a computer screen:

And they then hear LOOK AT THE RED UH...

they are most likely to look at that red Chinese looking character in the top corner (for the sake of this image it is a Chinese character). Being a native English speaker, the Chinese symbol would be foreign and different to them. This study suggests that disfluencies refer to unexpected objects.

The study goes on to show results for studies in which people were asked to click on objects, and also includes some ERP data. If you're interested I have the citation below:

Arnold, Jennifer E., Carla L. Hudson Kam, and Michael K. Tanenhaus. "If You Say Thee Uh You Are Describing Something Hard: The On-line Attribution of Disfluency during Reference Comprehension." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 33.5 (2007): 914-30. Print.