Ah, yes the week of daylight savings time (the hidden Armageddon). Some dude told me daylight savings time was created to make more money for the business folk. I have no idea what he was talking about, but I am sure we had a great week. Between confessions, snakes and tornadoes, things were pretty intense. We cooled down a little with some cucumber lemonade at The Box and some various new scenes. Make sure you check out our CVS debate and don’t forget that China and Charlottesville are in a Jell-O match of death. Happy reading. »Read More

Popularity: 16% [?]

I always make fun of girls that are scared of snakes, spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, crabs (sick), etc etc.

We can all admit that snakes are scary. How many people had friends who had snakes that ate the cat?

I digress. Two UVA researches did some studies on human responses to snakes. Did anyone take part? They discovered the following:

Snakes are among the most common targets of fears and phobias. In visual detection tasks, adults detect their presence more rapidly than the presence of other kinds of visual stimuli. We report evidence that very young children share this attentional bias. In three experiments, preschool children and adults were asked to find a single target picture among an array of eight distractors. Both the children and the adults detected snakes more rapidly than three types of nonthreatening stimuli (flowers, frogs, and caterpillars). These results provide the first evidence of enhanced visual detection of evolutionarily relevant threat stimuli in young children.

Pretty cool. Although to be all critical, aren’t three year olds pretty cultured at that age? If they are brought up in a society where snakes and spiders are scary things wouldn’t they react more quickly to snakes than non-scary things?

[via UVA] [pic]

Popularity: 17% [?]