Mind the Gap

Remember when when Gap tried to change their iconic logo and the immediate backlash from consumers? No? Well it happened. And as luck has it, neuroscientists were consulted for advice on why their new logo failed. Some advice:

-When a word overlaps with an image, the brain tends to ignore the word in favor of the image

-The capital “G” followed by lowercase letters makes our brains think of “Gap” as a word rather than a logo.

Some would argue that these are principles that every designer knows, regardless of lacking a neuroscience background. But it’s nice to know the neural reasoning for things we take for granted, like design.

via PR Newswire

Smile (?) for the Camera

Carl Zimmer recently reviewed studies by Dr. Niedenthal in the New York Times. In it, he reports a new theory on how a person detects different types of smiles. When we see someone smile, we tend to mimic the smile. This act of mimicry lights up different parts of our brain for different types of smiles (genuine, happy, fake, etc). Dr. Niedenthal’s model suggests we decode other’s smiles by analyzing our own brain activity when we mimic.

When subjects were shown fake and genuine smiles under two conditions, with and without pencils in their mouths, those who had their smile-muscles occupied by a pencil had a significantly harder time distinguishing the test smiles. It is good support for the model, but this is still a budding field.

Which is genuine?

Slow Down

Next time you see a summer blockbuster or art house film and you see a scene where everything is in slow motion, consider this: researchers have found that our perception of time is actually distorted during clips of slow and fast biological movements (such as people moving). For example, subjects reported that stimuli lasted for a shorter period of time while viewing slow motion footage. As well as being beautiful cinematic techniques, overcranking (slow motion) and undercranking (fast motion) film also affects our perception of reality.

Time perception is not always accurate. We know this from experience. An hour of playing a fun video game may feel like 15 minutes, a bad movie can feel like eternity. But interestingly, there is a 3-second “point of indifference,” a term coined in 1868. Tones shorter than 3-seconds are reported as being longer, and tones longer than 3-seconds are reported as being shorter. And even though technology has sped up, our cars got faster, and we’re constantly looking at 3 websites at once, this 3-second point of indifference has remained.

(Less) Food For Thought

A new study in Science argues that thinking about certain foods acually makes you consume less of that food, contrary to conventional wisdom.

Carey Morewedge and his team at Carnegie Mellon University experimented on subjects who sat next next to full a bowl of M&Ms.  Experimental groups were divided based on how many M&Ms they were told to “imagine eating” (respectively 0,3, and 30).  The group that was told to imagine eating the largest amount actually ate the least.

The authors argue that their result was due to “habituation.”  That is, the subjects got used to the presence of the delicious candies by imagining themselves binging on them, and “getting used” to the candies helped them control their intake.  The authors conclude:

These results suggest that mental representation alone can engender habituation to a stimulus.

Meanwhile, those with responsible “mental representations” (‘I’ll only eat 3′) went ahead and binged. Go figure.

via sciencedaily.com