More Coffee Please

• "To ascertain the extent to which people are insensitive to patches of serious conversational…"
  “To ascertain the extent to which people are insensitive to patches of serious conversational incoherence, we generated such patches in the laboratory by repeatedly crossing two unrelated conversations. Across two studies, involving both narrowly and broadly focused conversations, between 27% and 42% of the conversants did not notice that their conversations had been crossed. The results of these studies suggest that it may indeed be unrealistic to model spontaneous conversation as faithful information transmission.”

  – PLOS ONE: Do We Notice when Communication Goes Awry? An Investigation of People’s Sensitivity to Coherence in Spontaneous Conversation

• PLOS ONE: Self-Drying: A Gecko's Innate Ability to Remove Water from Wet Toe Pads
  PLOS ONE: Self-Drying: A Gecko’s Innate Ability to Remove Water from Wet Toe Pads:

  tl;dr: they walk on dry surfaces, vs. sitting still. Okay then.

• "These results lend support to the hypothesis that jealousy has some “primordial” form that exists in…"
  “These results lend support to the hypothesis that jealousy has some “primordial” form that exists in human infants and in at least one other social species besides humans.”

  – PLOS ONE: Jealousy in Dogs

• "Dr. MacFadyen also reminds us that ‘Smell of Books™’ is available as an aerosol E-Book enhancer – in…"
  “Dr. MacFadyen also reminds us that ‘Smell of Books™’ is available as an aerosol E-Book enhancer – in a range of flavours which include ‘New Book Smell’, and, for those who prefer the olfactory aesthesis of, say, rifling though a first edition old master ‘Classic Musty Scent’.”

  – Improbable Research » Blog Archive

• PLOS ONE: There Is No Joy like Malicious Joy: Schadenfreude in Young Children
  PLOS ONE: There Is No Joy like Malicious Joy: Schadenfreude in Young Children:

  We demonstrate that children as early as 24 months show signs of schadenfreude following the termination of an unequal situation. Although both conditions involved the same amount of gains, the children displayed greater positive expressions following the disruption of the unequal as compared to the equal condition, indicating that inequity aversion can be observed earlier than reported before. These results support an early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion and indicate that schadenfreude has evolved as a response to unfairness.

• "But a child in one of Peterson’s studies recalled an event from when he was just 18 months…"
  “But a child in one of Peterson’s studies recalled an event from when he was just 18 months old. It was the day his mother went to the hospital to give birth to a sibling. “He remembers crying on the floor of the kitchen, and he remembers how upset he was,” Peterson says. “And he can remember the pattern of his teardrops on the linoleum.””

  – The Forgotten Childhood: Why Early Memories Fade : Shots – Health News : NPR

• BBC News – Giant pythons have 'homing instinct'
  BBC News – Giant pythons have ‘homing instinct’:

  In case you happen to be out of homing pigeons, how ‘bout a homing python?

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