Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [430]
—On a winter day, at the edge of a pond where ducks are paddling about, two bundled-up researchers stand thirty yards apart; one throws a chunk of bread into the water every five seconds, the other every ten seconds. After a few days of this feeding, twice as many ducks cluster near the five-second thrower as the other. But some days later the researchers introduce a change: The ten-second thrower tosses in chunks twice as large as the five-second thrower. At first the ducks continue to assemble as they have been doing, two to one in favor of the faster thrower, but within five minutes they have redistributed themselves and are divided equally between the two—evidence, the researchers believe, of a sophisticated innate foraging strategy in which the ducks take into account not only the rate at which edible items appear but their average size.5 The study adds to knowledge of how time and quantity are nonverbally represented in the brains of animals and humans.
—A team of researchers gingerly positions miniature microphones inside the ear canals of a volunteer seated in the center of a circular framework on which six loudspeakers are mounted at different heights. The researchers then send white noise (a broad-spectrum hiss) through one speaker after another, rotating the apparatus 15 degrees at a time, until they have sent sound from 144 locations. Each time the volunteer identifies the position of the speaker by giving its direction and elevation in degrees. Later, using recordings of what the microphones picked up, the researchers transmit sound to the volunteer through earphones instead of the loudspeakers; he identifies the apparent directions from which the noise is coming in virtually perfect agreement with where it had come from in the actual condition. The experiment adds to knowledge of how the mind determines the direction of a sound source from the difference in time at which the sound reaches the ears.6
To this hodgepodge of images we could add any of the scores of others that have already been described or alluded to—everything from a psychotherapist Socratically leading a patient to recognize his unrealistic beliefs to a developmental psychologist recording the eye movements of an infant watching images flashed on a screen, and from a behavioral neuroscientist injecting epinephrine into a rat that has learned a maze to see how the hormone affects its memory to a cognitive scientist painstakingly constructing the thousands of steps of a computer program that, presented with hundreds of sentences, will learn language more or less as an infant does.
Beyond all this are many psychologists whose special interests and activities we have not taken time to explore, although some are of considerable relevance to everyday life. A few instances:
—Some are investigating the psychology of love and mate selection. At one time this was a much-researched field; then, being deemed too “soft”—not rigorously testable—it was sidelined. In the past couple of decades, however, there has been something of a resurgence of love research based on sophisticated statistical analyses of survey data and interviews, brain scans, cross-cultural data, and neurotransmitter science. Researchers have been using all these methods to distinguish between kinds of love (passionate, romantic, intimate, companionate, and so on), how some of these interact with sexuality, and how love changes over time.7 These sound like familiar and classic topics, but some of the methods of inquiring into them are strictly