Green Eggs and Ham by Patrick N. Rabanal

I could not, would not, in a house.

I would not, could not, with a mouse.

I would not eat them with a fox.

I would not eat them in a box.

I would not eat them here or there.

I would not eat them anywhere.

I would not eat green eggs and ham.

I do not like them, Sam-I-am.

How about green ketchup? Or black rice? Or black tacos? Or any of these food for that matter.

I remember being very picky with food when I was little. There were many things that I really didn’t want to eat, may it be because of its taste, texture, smell, or even just by its color. It may be easier to understand how taste, texture, and smell affect food’s taste because they seem to be a more “personal” experience as compared to just seeing its color. So now the question is: Does color of foods and drinks affect the sense of taste?

Charles Spencer et al. made a review of empirical literature concerned with the question of whether or not color does influence taste and performance. They found that previous studies showed ambiguous results because they were not able to distinguish two important aspect of the question: the identification of a flavor and the perceived intensity of the taste or flavor.

With regards to the identification of flavor, most studies support the claim that a food’s color does in fact affect a person’s judgment. One study they reviewed was DuBose’s Effects of colorants and flavorants on identification, perceived flavor intensity, and hedonic quality of fruit-flavored beverages and cakes. In the study, subjects tasted grape, lemon-lime, cherry and orange drinks with different colors. Results show that it was easier for the subjects to identify the correct flavor when the drink had the expected color. People made errors toward the taste that were expected for a particular color. For example, an orange-colored drink that was really cherry-flavored was often thought to taste like an orange drink or a green colored cherry drink would taste like lime.

With regards to Flavor intensity, studies show the color intensity affected the strength of a particular taste (Roth et al. 1988; Philipsen, 1995; Johnson & Clydesdale, 1982). In these studies, subjects were given flavored drinks that differed in sweetness and the amount of coloring. (lemon and lime – Roth; red – Philipsen and Johnson & Clydesdale). Results were similar showing that as the color of the drinks intensified, the people reported it to be sweeter.

It is apparent that color can affect the perception of foods and drinks. It is likely that people learn and become familiar with specific combinations of colors and tastes. These learned associations may alter our perceptions and create expectations about how a food should taste.

Food and drink companies are also very interested in the results of these experiments. It is important for companies to know how their products are perceived by consumers. Companies work very hard to make their foods and drinks the most desirable so they can sell more product.

Charles Spence; Carmel A. Levitan; Maya U. Shankar; Massimiliano, Z. (n.d). Does Food Color Influence Taste and Flavor Perception in Humans?. Chemosensory Perception, 3(1), 68-84.

Exams! Exams! Exams! Color>Students: Erik Andrade Tongol

           

          There are less than two months left for this school year. Requirements and exams are piling up again. Each of us has different rituals when taking exams. Some students ask for guidance to all kinds of gods while some just bring or wear all sorts of lucky charms. But what if you are already predestined to perform badly in the exam? Any kind of preparation beforehand will be ineffective.

            A study by Akers, Hodge & Tal (2008) showed that the paper color of your exam has an effect on your performance. They examined if there is an effect of paper color and question order on exam performance. In the first experiment, 594 introductory psychology students took a 40-question exam. The exams were printed in black ink on either white paper or four primary colors of paper: rojo red, lemon yellow, emerald green, and marine blue. In each color, questions are either in sequential or random order. In the second experiment, 681 students took the same exam but the exams were either printed on white paper or four pastel colored papers: pink, light yellow, light green, and light blue. Results showed that differently ordered exams do not affect performance but the color of the paper affected exam performance. Specifically, printing exams on primary colored papers affected exam performance. Students performed better on white paper and pastel colored papers than on vividly colored papers. Students performed worse on blue and red colored exams.

            Some professors have sets for their exams and these different sets are printed on different colored papers. So next time you have an exam, be sure to avoid the vividly colored papers because this may spell the difference between pass or fail. This information is very helpful for me because I take my studies seriously. With this piece of information, it can do well in my exams and ultimately graduate and be a doctor. 

Tal, I., Akers, K., & Hodge, G. (2008). Effect of paper color and question order on exam performance.. Teaching of Psychology, 35(1), 26-28.

I'm glad my room isn't red. By: Ge G.

It always interested me how the colors around us are believed to be able to affect our feelings or behavior. I’ve heard for example that orange is supposed to make us feel hungry, blue is supposed to make us feel calm, and green is supposed to make us feel refreshed. I know all these because we had just recently renovated our house and color (how it affects us, in particular) was such a big deal to my parents.

Their room used to be light blue because it apparently made them feel peaceful and tranquil. During the renovation, my dad decided to make their room yellow instead because it seemed happier and more welcoming. He also decided to make my sister’s room green (without her consent - she just came home one day to find her room had become green) because he thought it was refreshing and pleasant. I thought it looked gross, and so did my sister. But she studies in New York and only spends one month a year in her room here at home, so she didn’t bother complaining. I, on the other hand, was horrified by the thought of coming home one day to discover that my room had suddenly become baby pink or purple or whatever other color my dad thought would be nice – so I made him promise not to paint my room until I decided what color I wanted it to be.

I poured over interior design magazines and websites for days and finally decided that I wanted my room to be red. It was perfect because I imagined it would look so good with the dark mahogany furniture I already had, plus it’s actually my favorite color. I was so excited about the idea, but when I pitched it to my parents, they gave me a big fat NO. Apparently a red room might make me feel angry and irritable and increase my blood pressure. UHHH OKAAAAAAY. Haha. 


So I didn’t get my red room. My room is beige and brown now, and I actually really like it, but I still wonder what it would’ve been like if I got to paint my walls red.

Interestingly, I came across an article about the relationship between the color red and performance attainment. Studies have shown that colors can actually induce different physiological reactions that are expressed in our psychological functioning. Some colors are more stimulating and disagreeable (those with longer wavelengths, such as red) while others are more calming and agreeable (those with shorter wavelengths, such as blue and green). Supposedly, colors with longer wavelengths or those that are more stimulating, like red, can actually impair complex task performance. Red is also believed to induce more heuristic processing which affects cognitive performance. In this experiment, participants were presented either with red, green or an achromatic color as the cover page of their achievement task booklet. The achievement tasks were either language-based or number-based tests. In one part of the experiment, they also tested for avoidance motivation by letting the participants choose items to answer based on the difficulty level they wanted. What did they find out?

Results indicated that the participants’ perception of red did significantly impair performance on the tasks versus the presentation of green or an achromatic color. They also discovered that the participants who were exposed to red showed more avoidance motivation by choosing easier test items to answer.

Wooow, it’s a good thing I didn’t end up painting my room red. I’m not sure about the blood pressure and anger stuff my parents were talking about, but if perceiving red can impair my cognitive performance, it’ll definitely be a problem. Red may be my favorite color, but my parents were right: it isn’t a good color for a bedroom. Remind me to thank them tomorrow. Haha!

Oh yeah, and it turns out my sister’s green room isn’t so bad after all :)

Elliot, A. J., Maier, M. A., Moller, A. C., Freidman, R., & Meinhardt, J. (2007). Color and Psychological Functioning: The Effect of Red on Performance Attainment. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 136(1), pp. 154–168.

Color and Lighting in Hospital Designs by Mikki Miranda

I'll first start this article by showing some unrelated pieces of facts Randall Munroe - the artist behind xkcd.com - found when he did a color survey on the web. The results can be found in his blog. Here are a few of his discoveries:

• If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
• "Puke" and "vomit" are totally real colors.
• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type "fuck this" (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that "ROY G. BIV" acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
• Nobody can spell "fuchsia".
• Lastly here are some assorted things people came up with while labeling colors: assorted color names

Yes, our human ability to perceive different kinds of colors - even if we can't really name or spell some of them - is indeed a marvelous thing to ponder on. Most of us are aware that colors can elicit certain feelings, thoughts or behaviors: red for sexual readiness, blue for a calm atmosphere, green for environmental awareness, and so on and so forth. Many researches have  already shown that color has an effect on people's well-being, and along with lighting, the two factors come together to create an atmosphere that can have an impact on people's perceptions and responses to the environment. 


In Dalke et al's work entitled Color and Lighting in Hopsital Design, they reported that different color and lighting schemes are essential details on a hospital's visual environment. Different lighting and color design schemes have an effect on patient's recovery rates, improve the quality and overall experience of patients, staff and visitors, and promote a sense of well-being and independence. They are also powerful tools for coding, navigation and wayfinding.


Sharing: Just today, I attended a tour of a particular medical hospital and saw how they efficiently used colors as markers for many things. Using colors, one can navigate among the different department floors, plus colors are used to distinguish students among nurses. I believe it's a good system.


The aim of Dalke's project is to provide evidence-based research results on color and lighting in the hospital setting. One may call this research a "handbook" for would-be health care professionals or businessmen who'd want to improve or create their own hospital facilities. As their method, they audited 20 general, medium to large hospitals throughout England. They focused on finding out the important issues on key color and lighting schemes on the overall hospital experience as described by patients, staff and visitors.


What did they find out? Well many. But I think I'll just describe some of them:

Cool colors such as these types are believe to be calming which promotes relaxation as well as aid sleeping.

Sculpture, artwork and other landmarks can be useful visual cues in a wayfinding scheme.

A well-lit and well-designed working environment can aid recruitment and retention of staff as well as generally improving morale.

 Colour coding requires knowledgeable implementation and is best used for very simple zoning.

Colour coding should be obvious and easy for all visitors to recognize and use under all circumstances. But there should be no possibility of misunderstanding which are the coding colors.

Floor colour coding is useful for older and visually impaired people; this strategy at Poole hospital helped to reduce wall damage by alerting the staff steering trolleys of the nearness of walls.

Glossy floors can be confusing and cause major glare problems for older and visually impaired people.

Vision adaptation slows with aging and visual impairment. This corridor changes from extremely bright light to dim conditions without adequate lighting to aid the transfer.

Blue linen is often used in dermatology wards to minimise the distressing appearance of the orange treatment ointments on sheets for the patients.

Although blue is popular and effective the overuse of certain blues and greens in mental healthcare environments has been reported as exacerbating depression and creating an institutional feel for staff and service users

Fully saturated colour without any other contrasts can be desensitizing and visually overpowering. Strong colour should be balanced with other key colors.

These pictures are just tidbits of a vast array of information they presented in their research paper. It's very interesting realize how colors have an important role on ergonomics and health, to a certain extent, I guess. The next time I visit another medical school or hospital, I'll probably take note of the color scheme they used. Probably with enough courage, I'd be able to suggest this handbook to the Medical Directors.


Source:
Dalke, H., Little, J., Neimann, E., Camgoz, N., Steadman, G., Hill, S. & Stott, L. (2006). Colour and lighting in hospital design. Optics & Laser Technology. 38, 343-365.

On Automated Defenses, as Considered by Alexander Leandro Dela Fuente

When I was growing up, my parents had a rough list of required cultural material. Noteworthy among these, at least for this article, was the Alien trilogy. I was naught but a wee child at the time, but I trusted my parents and it really seems like they thought there was something in these movies that was worth the potential trauma.

To this very day, I still don't know what that something is. I did enjoy the films, but whatever deeper lessons necessitated ignoring a clear R-rating (Was it R-rated? It should have been.) remain out of my grasp.

I remember this scene, however:

It was an action scene, sure, but in light of our lessons in Psych 135 it also serves as an eye-opener about the detection and discrimination capabilities of these weapons. Aliens had the Colonial Marines relying on a motion-detection system for their sentry; once activated, the sentry guns were programmed to target and fire upon any moving objects in their field of vision. It's been a while since I last saw the movie (my siblings and I enjoyed the series enough for multiple viewings), but I think there was some mention of only firing at organic matter. This may be an implanted memory, of course, but I have no means of checking at this moment. In any case, the inclusion of an instrument that can discriminate between organic and inorganic matter seems to be pure science-fiction; in the unlikely scenario that it did make an appearance in the movie (not just in my imagination), such a system would beg the question of possibility. Can an automated non-contact scanner differentiate between organic and inorganic matter? Would it matter? I do not know, but it certainly sounds infeasible.

Wikipedia says modern sentry guns do not have the detection/discrimination capability of those depicted in fiction; however, a bit of searching in Google Scholar reveals that several groups are hard at work on disproving that apparently poorly-referenced claim. One such group, the Section L01, Turret Trackers Design Team under Dr. David Keezer, proposed a low-cost sentry gun, the Fully Autonomous Sentry Turret System. Three months later, they came out with a report on their working prototype. The prototype covered a greater field of view and acquired targets faster than initially proposed, at the cost of a lower effective range. To minimize the incidence of so-called friendly fire, a two-step discrimination system was used. The first mechanism relied on color recognition, the second on the constant transmission of an IR signal from individual allied personnel. Predominance of a specified safe color, on a scale of 0:255, identified a target as an allied individual; as I understand it, this hews closer to the trichromatic theory than it does to opponent processing theory. As for the IR signal, I don't think any specific neurological function can serve as a directly comparable system; at the very least, however, this might be the equivalent of an uttered safe word, much like those used in World War II. (American soldier says "Flash," confused German doesn't respond with "Thunder," gunfight ensues.)

Most of the article detailed how the proposed Fully Autonomous Sentry Turret system could be assembled and used with easy-to-find materials. While I was convinced by the effectiveness of their system, I sure do hope any adoption for military use will utilize more advanced discrimination systems. I know actual autonomous object discrimination is still far beyond the powers of present-day technology, but surely there are better ways to prevent friendly fire than the fulfillment of a monochromatic requirement and the use of an easily-replicated infrared signal. Human lives, after all, are at stake.

Monocular Cues: Let's Explore Some In Depth (pun intended)

Being able to see and perceive depth helps humans perceive a three dimensional world. Cues from the environment, such as relative size, shape, shadow and texture, are needed in order to achieve this feat. Monocular depth cues are ones that only need one eye to perceive. In this special edition of SINsations - The Seven Deadly Senses, we will explain the ten types of Monocular cues, which can be categorized into two subtypes: Pictorial cues, ones that occur in picture form, and Motion-Produced cues, ones that occur when the observer is in motion. 


Occlusion


When encountering Pictorial Cues, one must always be careful when considering Occlusion. As Pictorial Cues go, Occlusion isn't very useful; he only turns up whenever something in a person's field of vision obstructs her view of another object. He's developmentally retarded that way, but don't tell it to his face; giving obstructions the power to assert their proximity over occluded targets is all he ever wanted to do with his life.

Here are several amusing pictures; Occlusion may not be very helpful, but he sure can work a crowd.

The cowboy is in front of the woman.

The snake is in front of Van Damme's fist.

The child is further than the Ewok.

The lady is farther afield than the man's hand.

The Velociraptor is behind the post.

Samuel L. Jackson is behind the drink.

Mikki is in closer proximity to the camera, when compared to Allen.

Relative Height

Basically, the cue of relative height means that objects that are below the horizon and have their bases higher in the field of view are usually seen as being more distant. In this picture of the Beatles on Abbey road, we can see that the Beatles are of the same distance because their bases, their feet, are of the same height. If we look at the white car and black car we can see that the black car is a bit farther because the base of the black car, its fender, is higher in the field of view than the white car. 


Relative Size

The cue of relative size means that when two objects are of equal size, the one that is farther away will take up less of your field of view than the one that is closer. This cue can be seen in the image above. Notice for example the number eight ball and the number four ball, we know that the two balls are of equal size but the number four ball looks smaller and takes up less of our field of view because it is farther as compared to the number eight ball. 


Perspective Convergence

In a picture showing depth, two parallel lines that stretch out into a picture appear to come closer and closer together as they extend into the distance. In this picture for example, the lines on the road are actually parallel, but in illustrating the depth and distance in the picture, they look to be coming closer towards each other the father out they extend.


Familiar Size

Using prior knowledge about the size of objects to judge their distance is using familiar size cues. Simply put, under certain conditions, our knowledge of an object’s size influences our perception of its distance. In the example, we see the Eiffel Tower and a person. Based from prior knowledge, we know that the Eiffel tower is very big, around 320 m tall, and that the average person stands at only about 1.5-2 meters. This suggests that the Eiffel tower is so far behind the person to look that small.

Atmospheric Perspective

Atmospheric Perspective occurs when objects that are farther or are more distant appear less sharp and seem blurred with a slight blue tint. The farther the object is the more particles (air, dust, water particles, etc.) there is that we have to look through. In the following examples, the objects that are nearer are sharp with clearer details compared to the objects farther away.

Texture Gradient

A texture gradient can be used to show depth in a still frame. In this picture, we know that the flowers are all actually equally spaced and distributed in the field. But as the field extends into the distance, the flowers appear to be more tightly packed than the flowers that should be closer to the viewer. This gradient of texture creates an image of depth.     

Shadows


Shadows are created whenever light is occluded by an object. The dimensions of the resulting projection can be processed using the Pythagorean theorem to compute for the object's size. This is very useful for measuring tall, well-lit objects like flagpoles; many a high school student has successfully applied the teachings of Math to such a worthy assignment.


Shadows are also pretty useful when assessing the contours of an observed object. The variation in projected shadow size and intensity can do very much for 3D perception.

Shadows really bring melee combat to life, don't they?

Godzilla sure looks big. Thank lighting for the neck-shadow!

A lightsaber will help shine the way.

Big shadow = big Decepticon.

The Shadow: Bringing depth to 2D art since a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

Even without familiar objects for comparison, you know these AT-ATs are big. Thank the shadows!

Motion Parallax

During car rides, people are fond of looking out their windows to enjoy the scenery outside. As experienced in one of my night rides, it can't be helped but to notice how the different colored lights on the portions of nearby buildings on my side of the road seem to blur as they move past by me. However, the moon seems to move at a slower rate; the same can be said for the mountains on the horizon. How is this possible when they seem to lie on the same plane of  vision? 

Motion Parallax is the key to understanding this perceptual phenomenon.  The use of this depth cue in cartoons may provide an explanation. 

We came across this interesting short clip of a mouse using a rocket to fly over varied terrain.

We can observe how the trees, tall shrubs, or grass (I don’t exactly know what they are) seem to glide rapidly past by our vision compared to the clouds and mountains that comprise the distant background. Differences in the speed by which we see objects when we are moving can be accounted for by our retinas. As we are subjected to motion, the image of nearby objects, in this case the tall shrubs, seem to move more rapidly past by us because they travel at a farther distance across our retinas compared to distant objects such as the moon and the mountains.

Many computer games and movies have made use of this depth cue to enhance movement perceptions in scenes.  Commercial value is improved as they become more entertaining to those who view these technological advancements using motion parallax.

To learn more about Motion Parallax, you can visit this site: http://psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/MotionParallax/MotionParallax.html

Deletion and Accretion

Because of academic and other kind of stress(es), I closed my eyes and play with my hands.  I positioned my hands as my right hand is at arm's length and my left hand is at about half the distance, just to the left of the right hand.  And as I moved my head sideways to the left and then back again while keeping my hands still, covering rgiht hand (deletion) and uncovering it (accretion) are observed.