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Bouba/kiki effect

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101–110 of 176 posts

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the ability diminishes in adults, or if adults are more inhibited and worried about looking foolish. Try the same experiment with adults after drinking alcohol!

If you take this picture and ask adults and kids which way the bus is traveling, kids get it right more often than adults https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-way-bus-going-why-adult... Spoilers: adults prune information for more efficient processing and in doing so lose information

Huh, it seems to me that realizing buses have doors on the side adjacent to the edge of the road is more an example of crystallized intelligence than fluid.

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#102
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors. Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack…

Or because kids are very familiar with busses and adults are not.

Interestingly I got it instantly but I’ve used busses far more in my adult life than as a child

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#103

The waveforms for "Bouba" are less "spiky" I'd guess: fewer overtones, less noisy, more tonal, so more round and quasi periodical

this implies that humans have an intuitive sense of the shape of the waveform, which I think would be surprising!! And also empirically testable (not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily obvious to me as true. The sound is a vibration/signal, how our brains interpret it may have no correlation to its "shape". Do we have an intuition for "spiky" electromagnetic signals? maybe we do, that's why looking at natu…

Of course we do, humans can sense timbre and transients and all that

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#104
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher frequencies carry more energy, also every human has a sense of waveforms. It's called "sound". Tonality and sound differentiation are deeply important to speech as well as for recognizing animals. Then there's music, of course :) But I guess you were getting at some sort of synaesthesia? Indeed an interesting question how that is related. I was referring to waveforms because of the duality with sound

I think the surprising thing would be if the logic goes high frequency -> spiky waveform -> spiky shape, because that would imply that that particular representation of the sound is being used as part of the intuition. Which would be unusual, as it's not generally how people experience sound (for sure the opposite doesn't really occur: even someone very used to looking at waveforms will struggled to actually understa…

Well we don’t hear in the time domain, we hear in the frequency domain. The neuron firing rate is too slow to sample audio. Our ear does a kind of Fourier decomposition. Still in a sense we’re hearing the waveform, just the Fourier decomposition of it.

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#105
post #5

What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?

In (US?) English if you were to describe some thing and you had many adjectives for its size, color, origin, age, a visual pattern like "polka dot" or striped, and so on - many native speakers (at least in my region) would intuitively assemble that clause in the same order as each other without really being able to clearly articulate why. There are some supposed grammar rules that inform it but in my circles people j…

The adjective order thing is a bit overwrought—the basic ordering rule is "more essential qualities bind closer to head". That's not a comprehensive rule, and to the extent how saliently essential qualities should be considered is vibes-based and not culturally universal, but it does quite well at explaining some apparent exceptions ("Chinese green tea" > ?"green Chinese tea") and implications of violating the "rule".

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c". I feel like this would be less confusing if rendered as "±(a+b-c)". It's the same amount of cognitive effort for figuring out the second term/factor, but you get the first one for free.

What you’ve suggested is not equivalent. The a is always taken without negation, and that’s not the case in your rendering.

Ah. "a±(b-c)" then.

The fact I made that mistake in the first place just makes me more convinced the original form is unnecessarily complex to parse.

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#107
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors. Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack…

Yeah, this bus is clearly intended to be a school bus but it’s missing too much detail. If the absence of the door is a valid clue, then so is the absence of the big red stop sign that is on the non-door-side.

Lay off the copium - busses don’t have red stop signs everywhere (for example they don’t have them here)

But they always have doors…

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take this picture and ask adults and kids which way the bus is traveling, kids get it right more often than adults https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-way-bus-going-why-adult... Spoilers: adults prune information for more efficient processing and in doing so lose information

I don't think this is a good example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors. Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack…

Isn't this exactly the point? You look at this the analytical way, decide the bus doesn't have enough detail to be a realistic representation and stop there, maybe looking around for other clues. A very good example imo.

Sure, the bus could be in reverse, but it could also be a British bus driving in the US. Or we could be looking at a reflection of the bus. Or we could be looking at the reflection of a British bus going in reverse. This is not about determining the direction with 100% certainty. This is about having a clue at all which you can justify, which adults mostly don't.

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#109

Fifteen years ago I went to a museum exhibit on Reggio Emilia teaching methods that I still think about once a week or so. (Reggio Emilia is similar to Montessori in that it is child-led exploration but different in that encourages multiple cross-modal forms of expression to aid comprehension.) The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-modal exercise of drawing the sounds of various types of shoe…

>This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a remarkable synesthetic intuition

The more I learn about children the more it seems like childhood is basically 20-year-long acid trip with a bit of amphetamine here and there.

Re: Bouba/kiki effect

#110
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher frequencies carry more energy, also every human has a sense of waveforms. It's called "sound". Tonality and sound differentiation are deeply important to speech as well as for recognizing animals. Then there's music, of course :) But I guess you were getting at some sort of synaesthesia? Indeed an interesting question how that is related. I was referring to waveforms because of the duality with sound

I think the surprising thing would be if the logic goes high frequency -> spiky waveform -> spiky shape, because that would imply that that particular representation of the sound is being used as part of the intuition. Which would be unusual, as it's not generally how people experience sound (for sure the opposite doesn't really occur: even someone very used to looking at waveforms will struggled to actually understa…

Consider why we call some sounds "acute".
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