Inspired by XKCD comics’ Thing Explainer, we are now posting descriptions of our new publications as they come out using the 1000 most commonly used English words (http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/). We find it not only clears out the jargon to help non-experts understand our research, it helps us understand our research better too.
Roberts, K. H., Truong, G., Kingstone, A., & Todd, R. M. (2017). The blur of pleasure: Appetitively appealing stimuli decrease subjective perceptual acuity. Psychological Science. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1177/0956797617702698.
People always say that “time flies by when we are having fun” and can feel like it “takes forever” when we are not. As it turns out, this may be true! This feeling really does hold up when we study it. Still, we do not know whether how good we are at seeing the world as things happen is changed by how much we like what we are seeing. In this study, we answered that question.
We studied how good people are at seeing things moment-to-moment when the things they see are good or bad. People told us if images of things they want (like sweet stuff… oh yeah), things they don’t want (like seriously hurt-things… tear), and boring things (like office scenes… boring!) faded to black in a nice and even, or a broken-up way. A broken-up way would mean that people saw the fading scenes more clearly, as if time went by more slowly so they could see every small change — one bit at a time. A nice and even way would mean that people saw the fading scenes less clearly, like lines in the road when you drive faster, as if time went by more quickly. This study showed that good things make us see less clearly and bad things make us see more clearly as they fade away. In fact, the better the things were, and the more we wanted them, the less broken-up the images were as they faded out. Brain wave information told us that this happens really fast, as we are seeing the scenes, and not just later when we think about them. So, it turns out that we see the things that we want less clearly, as if we were running fast to get them!
