architecture psychology

A research team lead by Barilari confirms that humans process sensory information in intriguing ways.  They report that “Across cultures and languages, people find similarities between the products of different senses in mysterious ways.  By studying what is called cross-modal correspondences, cognitive psychologists discovered that lemons are fast rather than slow, boulders are sour, and red is heavier than yellow.  Are these cross-modal correspondences established via sensory perception or can they be learned merely through language?  We [demonstrate] that early blind people [blind before

Esteky and colleagues linked what floor we’re on in a building and our response to financial risks – being even a few stories higher or lower in a building produces a noticeable effect on how humans think.  The researchers determined that  “high physical elevation increases risk-seeking tendencies.”  The effect is stronger when elevation is something people are aware of because they look out of a window.  The investigators also report that “In an unpublished study, we found that consumers at higher (vs. lower) elevations are more likely to consume juice from an unfamiliar (vs.

Work by Anglada-Tort and his colleagues confirms that labels influence our opinions of various sorts of art.  As the Anglada-Tort team reports, previous research has “shown that titles influence peoples’ evaluation of visual art.”  The Anglada-Tort lead team “investigated whether names presented with music pieces influenced aesthetic and value judgments of music. Experiment 1 . . . focused on linguistic fluency. The same music excerpts were presented with easy-to-pronounce (fluent) and difficult-to-pronounce (disfluent) names. Experiment 2 . . . studied the affect heuristic.

Haga studied the repercussions of labeling a lamp “environmentally friendly.”  He reports that “Built environments with objects that are labeled ‘environmentally friendly’ appear to change people’s behavior. For example, one study has shown that labeling a desktop lamp ‘environmentally friendly’ can enhance color discrimination, in comparison with when the lamp is labeled ‘conventional,’ even though there is no physical difference between the two lamps. This article explored . . .

Schwartz and his team studied the implications of changing postures while working – in other words standing after a period sitting or sitting after a time standing.  They learned that when “Subjects executed validated cognitive tests (working speed, reaction time, concentration performance) either in sitting or alternating working postures on two separate days . . . . results suggest that working posture did not affect cognitive performance in the short term.. .