• Question: what is the most surprising thing you have found out during your research so far?

    Asked by DaBestUnicorn to Nadine, Daniel, Carolyn, Alyssa on 8 Jan 2018.
    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

      One good example is in a study I ran when I worked in Sophie Scott’s lab at UCL. We were interested in how a specific part of the brain – the motor cortex – responded to hearing different types of laughter. The motor cortex of the brain controls the movements of parts of the body, including the voice. We had a strong prediction that this part would respond more strongly to hearing laughs that were real (compared with fake laughs) because we thought that listeners would activate their motor cortex more strongly for contagious (real) laughs. Instead, we found that another region in the front of the brain showed a really strong difference, where it showed stronger activation to *fake* laughs. The brain region we saw is typically involved in trying to work out the mental state of other people. This taught us something quite useful about the social importance of laughter, because we found that our listeners were automatically engaging that part of the brain as soon as they heard laughs that were not authentic.

    • Photo: Alyssa Alcorn

      Alyssa Alcorn answered on 8 Jan 2018:

      (Warning, simplification ahead)
      Substantial academic research on autism, starting with the earliest accounts of autism in the 1940’s, emphasises that people on the spectrum often have a “need for sameness” and may find change, difference, and transitions very stressful and difficult. During my PhD on touchscreen games for autism (focus on primary-aged children), I found that a certain level of change and “surprises” in the games interested children very much, and motivated them to communicate with other people about the games in a positive way. This at first seems to contradict what other autism research says, but my work suggested that there is actually a balance, a point at which something new or different can be interesting and noticeable, but not upsetting. I think we can use this idea in games, to help encourage children practice their social skills.

      You can see the games I developed for my PhD here: https://sites.google.com/site/amalcorn0131/gamesdemos

    • Photo: Daniel Mills

      Daniel Mills answered on 10 Jan 2018:

      this is perhaps one of the more surprising results we have found. In later studies we found they didn’t even use smell to group objects.
      http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/321/20121123/dogs-identify-objects-size-shape.htm

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