design research

Research conducted by Lemon, Li, and Ali confirms that there are significant connections between our sensory experiences; their study is published in The Journal of Neuroscience.  A related press release reports that “If you have eaten a chili pepper, you have likely felt how your body reacts to the spicy hot sensation. New research published by biologists at the University of Oklahoma shows that the brain categorizes taste, temperature and pain-related sensations in a common region of the brain.

A recent study indicates that we respond differently to material presented on paper than on digital devices.  Allen shares that “research by Maferima Toure-Tillery  [co-author Lili Wang]. . . finds that people are more likely to engage in virtuous behavior when they make their selections on paper than when they are using a digital device. . . Their study, which was conducted in both the U.S. and China, shows that the effect extends to several types of virtuous behavior, from charitable giving to choosing educational reading material over page turners.

Maister and colleagues learned how subjective our assessments of our own faces and bodies are; their findings can likely be applied in other situations in which assessments are made.  The researchers report that they “used a computational reverse-correlation technique to explore individuals’ mental ‘self-portraits’ of their faces and body shapes in an unbiased, data-driven way. . . . Self-portraits were similar to individuals’ real faces but, importantly, also contained clues to each person’s self-reported personality traits, which were reliably detected by external observers. . . . .

He and teammates link goodness and facial attractiveness;  it is possible that their findings can be applied more broadly.  The team report that “A well-documented ‘beauty is good’ stereotype is expressed in the expectation that physically attractive people have more positive characteristics. Recent evidence has also found that unattractive faces are associated with negative character inferences. . . This study tested the hypothesis that complementary ‘good is beautiful” and “bad is ugly” stereotypes bias aesthetic judgments. . . . this . . .

Duran-Barraza and colleagues evaluated how titles influence responses to artistic photography.  They report that “Conceptual information is central to the field of artistic photography. . . . we investigated whether artist's conceptual titles affected viewers’ interest in artistic photographs. Experiment 1 showed that adding artist's conceptual titles increased both the rated liking of and interest in the photographs, whereas adding a descriptive title had no effect.