Archive for May 20th, 2009

Slightly tangential here, but I couldn’t resist this image, via Space and Culture, of what, at first glance, resembles the kind of aerial landscape one sees upon immediately departing Newark’s Liberty Airport but is actually a “tapestry made out of old motherboards”

It reminded me of something that Kazys recently reminded me of, which is the following reference in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49:

“She thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had … There were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

As we’re on the topic of curious psychological effects, have you ever, as a passenger in a car, stared to the side, at a driver in the neighboring lane, and suddenly had them turn to face you?

This is a game I sometimes play when bored in the back of a taxi, and it can be quite disconcerting. I have often wondered: Am I simply remembering with greater frequency and fidelity those times when somebody actually looked back, and forgetting all the times they didn’t, invoking a sort of memory bias (e.g., because I think that people stare back I am primed to remember the times they actually do)?

The rogue psychologist Rupert Sheldrake has explored the “eyes in the back of the head” phenomenon (or what he calls the “non-visual detection of vision”) in his book The Sense of Being Stared At, which has occasioned a good amount of critical commentary. But, as Sheldrake has noted, the feeling that this sense exists is quite strong:

Most people have had the experience of turning round feeling that someone is looking at them from behind, and finding that this is the case. Most people have also had the converse experience. They can sometimes make people turn around by staring at them. In surveys in Europe and North America, between 70% and 97% of the people questioned said they had had personal experiences of these kinds (Braud et al., 1990; Sheldrake, 1994; Cottrell et al., 1996).

When I do in this car, of course, I am more properly considered to be alongside the other person, or just behind, so it’s perhaps not as much as a “non-visual” detection as a peripheral detection. But still, it seems quite powerful — what would make someone take their eyes off the road and return my glance? (another proviso here is that they may simply have been turning to look at my car, out of idle curiosity). Is it some primitive apparatus for detecting hazards? Is it that incredibly powerful ability we humans have (and which the non-human primates do not) to detect, and make, eye contact?

What’s interesting too is what happens once that driver in the other lane meets my eyes. Often, they look a bit startled, or uncomfortable, and I myself try to look away, having been uncomfortably caught out. This too has been examined by psychologists, as this piece in Scientific American notes:

In one version of the experiment, the research assistant pulled up in his motor scooter next to a car waiting at a red light and stared expressionlessly at the driver until the light turned green. In another version, the research assistant stood on the street corner, turned to face an approaching pedestrian, and again stared expressionlessly at this person’s face for an uncomfortable length of time.

As predicted, being stared at prompted people to ‘flee’ measurably faster than not being stared at. In the case of the motor scooter, car drivers who were in the staring condition stepped on the gas pedal harder when the light turned green than those in the control condition, as measured by the length of time it took them to cross the intersection. Likewise, pedestrians who were stared at also picked up their step.

In any case, I’m curious to hear from readers: Do you ever notice this effect? Are there any other explanations I’ve left out?

Reading Roadguy’s account (I’ve got the Twin Cities on my mind, I guess) of his trip to this year’s American Planning Association meeting, I was intrigued by his description of a panel on “digital billboards.”

Roadguy noted a delicious sort of Catch-22 during the talk: “Fellow panelist Marya Morris, a Chicago-area consultant, pointed out the conundrum that owners of digital signs face: They argue that the signs aren’t distracting while simultaneously telling advertisers that such billboards “can’t be ignored.”

I’ve not yet seen a good, peer-reviewed study on the safety (or lack thereof) of digital billboards (and if anyone has, please advise). Anything from the industry must be viewed as suspect (guess what: they’re safe!), and a controlled, before-and-after study of a highway section where a billboard has been added would be a tricky proposition (unless it became an immediately apparently crash hotspot). One study I’d like to see done, just of out curiosity, would be to gather loop data near the billboards: Do they have a deleterious effect on traffic flow itself?

Roadguy noted something else of interest: “Morris and Baker both spoke about the Zeignarnik effect, a psychological compulsion to focus on a task not yet completed, and how it causes drivers to look at digital signs repeatedly. Baker cited a billboard in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as particularly perilous: it displays multi-part riddles.”

Not having had any psychology as an undergrad, this Zeigarnik effect was new to me, but as I love a good effect (who doesn’t?), I cast a cursory Google-glance over at 43folders and found this delightful account:

“While sitting in a restaurant in Vienna—every good story about a psychologist takes place in Vienna—Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that a waiter could remember a seemingly endless number of items that had been ordered by his customers. However, once he had delivered the orders to the waiting diners, he no longer remembered what he had just served….

Though Zeigarnik didn’t get her coffee cup refilled following her meal, she did get into the annals of psychology. Zeigarnik theorized that an incomplete task or unfinished business creates “psychic tension” within us. This tension acts as a motivator to drive us toward completing the task or finishing the business. In Gestalt terms, we are motivated to seek “closure…”

The implication is that people remember incomplete processes more more than those that are completed.

I’m no brain expert or psychologist, but I wonder if the waiter was simply storing those orders in short-term memory, and, having concluded they were no longer of importance, was not encoding them to longer-term memory (and just how many orders could a waiter remember, echoes of that “seven-digit” effect of short-term memory).

And I can also imagine this this effect might be served up by marketers as a bit of psychological juju to help sell their product: As opposed to a static billboard, whose message one would instantly absorb and then discard (as with one’s memory of traffic signs they’ve passed), some sort of narrative-in-progress might leave the driver/viewer hungry for a kind of resolution, “wanting more,” and thus dwelling more on the subject than they might have. But again, it’s hard to argue that the same stickiness that’s good for marketing would be good for driving.

At the CTS conference yesterday at the University of Minnesota, I was chatting with a traffic engineer who relayed an interesting anecdote. As a traffic engineer, he is used to addressing packed rooms of people, all filled with firmly held convictions on the way things should be done. He was chatting with a colleague, a civil engineer, about whether people ever offered any input at meetings concerning things like sewer systems. The answer was no.

It should be said that I’m of the opinion that, particularly in some local jurisdictions, community residents might actually have a better idea of how to control their streets than engineers working with standardized approaches; and that, too often, streets are merely viewed as sewers of a sort, channels for simply moving as much stuff — i.e., cars — as possible, with insufficient thought for other considerations.

But the engineer also had a quite valid point, which beleaguered traffic engineers face every day at town meetings across America when trying to, say, tout the benefits of a roundabout. Suddenly, there will be a volley of criticism: Those things are dangerous, they will make traffic worse, etc., despite all statistical evidence to the contrary. Of course, people offering these opinions typically never have actual evidence, nor have they studied the problem in depth, and yet they feel comfortable to make diagnoses on engineering problems which it seems they would not feel comfortable doing in any other arena.

I thought of this morning when reading a dispatch on how Kansas City is going to introduce ramp metering to its highways (thanks Bryan).

This, not surprisingly, prompted a letter in the local paper:

Metering entrance ramps to I-435 is a terrible idea (5/13, National/Local, “Engineers turn to ramp meters to ease gridlock”). I travel to Milwaukee several times a year, and they have metered ramps onto I-94. They slow traffic down, especially during rush hour.

People who live in Milwaukee and drive on the interstates hate them. Each time I drive up there I can’t wait to get back to Kansas City, where we know how to let people get around.

Ramp meters, as I mention in Traffic, are a particular case where the individual windshield perspective of drivers cannot account for the larger flow of the traffic system, with its multitude of variables; user optimality trumps system optimality in the mind of the driver. As one engineer told me, people ask me, why are you stopping me, the highway’s moving? The highway’s moving because we’re stopping you.” But hold on, K.C. engineers, throw out those models, rip up those studies — we’ve got a driver who “travels several times a year to Milwaukee,” where “everybody” hates ramp meters (everybody, except, presumably the people who are moving more smoothly than they would be without them). But there is “room” on the highway for people to enter, this driver notes. “Room,” or “capacity” as engineers might more properly say, is, alas, not the only variable to consider in highway flow, and indeed, squeezing another driver into that “room” might disrupt the flow, pushing the stream past its critical density, plunging the system from a congested synchronous flow into stop-and-go congestion. Of course, some ramp metering schemes do send traffic back up the ramps — but one might also note that those ramps might typically be backed up already, and that in some cases this is actually made worse without ramp meters. And I need hardly point out that one cannot judge the success or failure of a ramp metering scheme simply by judging one on-ramp at any one time — rush-hour traffic on a congested urban system is an incredibly complex array of networks and flows that are well beyond the ability of any one driver to fully intuit what is going on.