Psychology: What did you really see? You'd be surprised!

I'll be reviewing a book called The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues by Mike Gene. He recounts an interesting experiment that demonstrates the extent to which we perceive what we expect to perceived, as described by Daniel Chandler, a lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth:

In an experiment by Brewer and Treyens (1981), individual participants were asked to wait in an office [photo]. The experimenter said that this was his office and that they should wait there whilst he checked the laboratory to see if the previous participant had finished. After 35 seconds, he returned and took the participant to another room where they were asked to recall everything in the room in which they had been waiting. People showed a strong tendency to recall objects consistent with the typical "office schema." Nearly everyone remembered the desk and the chair next to it. Only eight out of the 30 recalled the skull (!), few recalled the wine bottle or the coffee pot, and only one recalled the picnic basket. Some recalled items that had not been there at all: 9 remembered books. This shows how people may introduce new items consistent with the schema. (pp. 125-26)

Gene notes,

The experiment is intriguing in that most people failed to notice a skull sittiing on the desk, while many others recalled seeing books that never existed. The "schema" that Chandler refers to is essentially the mind-set or context that we bring to the situation. Since the people knew they were in an office, they failed to notice objects that are not normally in an office.

Or, as Sherlock Holmes liked to say, "You see but you do not observe."

Does this mean we can't trust anything we see? No, biasese may interfere with our ability to observe.

Do you taste what you see? What you remember? What you think you ought to?

We sometimes hear it said that human beings are far less sensitive than animals to smell and taste (the two senses being linked somewhat). One complexity is that cultural and personal ideas about what we are tasting play a major role in how we respond. In "Science: Could martinis be the secret of Bond's success?" (Telegraph, May 20, 2008), Roger Highfield offers some examples,

The appearance of a drink can also affect how happy we are with it: our brains make a pleasant association between the colours of ripening fruit and increased sugar content.

"Such colours, particularly bright reds, are especially powerful visual cues," says Prof Spence. "When incorporated into a drink, they can dramatically change the perceived flavour, as well as increasing the perceived sweetness by as much as 12 per cent."

French researchers tested this by using an odourless dye to colour white wine red. The wine tasters who tried the result used typical red wine descriptors, suggesting that its colour played a significant role in how they thought of it. "In cocktails, I'll look at how the very same colour can lead different people to think of, and therefore taste, very different flavours," says Prof Spence.

So did James Bond, world's best known secret agent, ace the cocktails? Apparently yes, and to celebrate the centenary of Bond novelist Ian Fleming's birth, Professor Charles Spence and Dr Andrea Sella will lecture on the proper way to prepare a cocktail he would love at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June. All for the good of science, of course.

Didn't you hear what I said? All for the good of ... okay, okay, it sounds to me like a good ol' bash too. Won't be quite the same without Fleming and Bond though.