Welcome to the statsART blog!

Welcome to the statsART blog where we highlight recent research, mainly work that has been discussed in the media.
Please note that the views expressed here only represent the views of the statsART blogger.
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Friday 30 April 2010

Politicians or chimpanzees?

This is a really interesting analysis of the final political debate from an evolutionary psychologist.

The comparison between the three part leaders and chimp behaviour is scarily accurate, and quite funny :o)

Thursday 29 April 2010

Foreign Accent Syndrome...

I find Foreign Accent Syndrome fascinating. Essentially, typically after a head injury or stroke, the patient loses their accent and acquires a new accent - often from a different country and one they may have never even visited!

Although rare, this syndrome must be able to tell us lots about language and accent acquisition.

What I find most interesting is that accents are acquired very early in life and it is very difficult to learn how to pronounce words in different languages after the "critical age" (around puberty). This is why it is so difficult to learn a foreign language as an adult and even more to to acquire a convincing accent. So instantly acquiring a perfect foreign accent due to an injury to a specific part of the brain is just fascinating!!!

Tuesday 27 April 2010

Big numbers...

This is a really interesting article which uses "Tesco" as a unit of measurement for big numbers...

It uses UK yearly sales (£40bn) to look government spending.

The fact that both the bank bailouts and the UK defense budget = 1 Tesco is slightly scary!

I wonder how many Tesco's are spent on higher education in the UK each year...

Tuesday 20 April 2010

First ever blog...

Very exciting!!!

I'm a research psychologist and stats geek who is particularly into SPSS. My research looks into the neuropsychology of face processing. So - how does the brain process faces, such as the identity of a person or their emotional expression? But what I'm really interested in is how this differs between people. Do males and females process faces differently in the brain? Does handedness influence how the brain processes faces? How do hormones effect the way our brains process facial emotion?

With this blog I'm planning on sharing interesting tidbits of new research and probably various rants about how research is badly portrayed in the media.