There is a new online tool available: the online spreadsheet merger. This simple tool allows you to merge multiple spreadsheets into one, select relevant columns and convert plain-text spreadsheets (.csv/.txt) into Excel format (.xls) and vice versa.

This tool has been created mostly as a convenience for users of OpenSesame, the graphical experiment builder, which outputs data as separate .csv files per subject. The online spreadsheet merger has been created to accommodate users who prefer to have all participant data in a single spreadsheet.

Check it out!

During our departmental "Christmas" dinner, yesterday evening, the subject of an automatic manuscript generator came up. I was kind of intrigued, so I looked it up and found SCIgen, an online tool created by three MIT graduate students.

And of course I couldn't resist.

Kind of cool, right? The manuscript contains graphs and everything. And although the content is totally incoherent (the creators prefer the term "context-free"), there are no screaming grammatical errors.

I was amazed, amused and shocked to learn that a few such generated papers have actually been accepted as conference submissions and by "peer-reviewed" journals. Perhaps it isn't terribly surprising that you can get a paper like that into a shady journal where you pay to publish. But I was shocked that even Elsevier, an established publisher, accepted a random paper for publication in the journal Applied Mathematics and Computation (impact factor 1.124). How on earth can …

Risk aversion is a well known feature of human decision making. It refers to our tendency to choose a certain payoff over an uncertain, but potentially higher payoff. For example, most people prefer getting E500 over a 50/50 chance of getting E1000. A more abstract form of risk aversion, usually called ambiguity aversion, is our tendency to avoid situations in which we don't know the odds of a good outcome at all, in favor of risky situations in which we do know the odds. For example, we like a 50/50 chance of getting E1000 better than an unknown chance of receiving E1500. In other words, we don't like risks, but we like unknown risks even less.

In a forthcoming paper in Biology Letters, Rosati and Hare show that chimps and bonobos are ambiguity averse as well. They let monkeys choose between a piece a food that they could have for sure (but wasn't always very tasty) and two pieces of food, of which they would get one (but they didn't know which). On some trials the monkeys could see these two pieces of food and on some trials they couldn't. The “sure thing” piece of food was always visible to the monkeys. What they found was that monkeys tended to stick to the sure thing if they weren't able to see the other two pieces of food, even if the sure thing wasn't very tasty.

Another cool finding was that this ambiguity aversion lasted only very briefly and …

Suchow and Alvarez report a very compelling optical illusion in an upcoming edition of Current Biology. The illusion is very simple and I was quite surprised that it actually works. A cloud of colored dots is arranged in a circle around a central fixation point. In one condition, the dots gradually change color, but they don't move. As you would expect, it is very easy to spot the color changes in this condition. However, in another condition, the dots move around as well as change color. Surprisingly, in this condition the color changes are extremely difficult to detect! This is demonstrated quite nicely in the video below (provided by the authors).

How does the illusion work? An important clue is that retinal motion is required. If you match the movement of the dots with your eyes, thus eliminating the retinal motion, it becomes considerably easier to detect the color changes (not as easy as when the dots are static, but this is presumably because it is difficult to match the movement perfectly). Simply put, this suggests that we detect the color changes with neurons that “see” only a small part of our retina. If the dots move around on our retina, they are continuously “seen” by different neurons, and this compromises our ability to detect changes.

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How would you like to have a publication in a prestigious scientific journal at the age of 9? In a forthcoming paper in Biology letters, children from a British elementary school describe a study that they have (largely) designed and executed themselves.

The experiment was as follows. In a training phase, bees learned that they could get a sugar-reward by flying to a small square in the center of a larger square. Sometimes the small square was blue and the surrounding square was yellow and sometimes it was the other way around. To learn this task, the bees had to use both spatial (center square vs surrounding square) and color cues (since the squares were defined by color). In the test phase, they found that the bees had successfully learned to solve this “puzzle”.

As the children say, “the experiment is important because no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment before”. Of course, the reason that the paper has attracted so much attention is because of the kids. But still, I think it is laudable that, in a comment accompanying the paper, Biology Letters focuses mostly on the scientific content and is not patronizing at all.

The paper can be downloaded for free and, unlike many scientific papers, it is quite readable, so go ahead and take a look!

Photo: Bombus Terrestris (source: Wikimedia Commons)

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