Bouba/kiki effect
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-modal exercise of drawing the sounds of various types of shoes walking down stairs to illustrate the "Hundred Languages of Children" concept. It showed how kids translate auditory experiences into visual ones - high heels would been drawn with spikey patterns and construction boots would be big wavey ones. This is reminiscent of the Bouba-Kiki effect. But other smaller nuances such as duration translating to span and loudness to magnitude.
I took away a fascinating insight from childhood cognition: children effortlessly bridge sensory modalities, an ability that often diminishes in adults to the point that asking an adult to “draw this sound” or “build something that feels like this smell” is met with a blank look but which a child is often completely game to try. Tasking an adult with a cross-modal assignment literally does not compute.
This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a remarkable synesthetic intuition, using diverse forms of expression to understand and interpret the world—an ability I had completely forgotten as an adult, which hindered my communication with young children in early education environments.
It highlighted the importance of nurturing cross modal communication styles and once one notices it (like in say Mr. Rogers opening ritual to use multiple queues to engage children’s parasympathetic nervous system) one unlocks a whole new vocabulary with not just children but adults. It’s been a powerful tool in my creative toolbox since.
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
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 of knowledge. (Of levels of abstraction in representation and of vehicle design.) That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the underlying point being made.
https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...
I’d expect an adult to be more familiar with a bus by virtue of having taken the bus more often than a child. Whether or not that’s exciting or just a mundane commute shouldn’t affect familiarity.
But they always have doors…
The other day someone pointed at the open platform of RM1353 and asked me: did you take the doors off this bus? “No, it was built that way.” She looked amazed, and pleased.
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.
EDIT: And if the question weren't ambiguous, you'd basically be telling people the answer, since as soon as you say "assume it's in the US", you give a massive clue that bilateral asymmetry is relevant.
Spoiler follows:
The solution is supposedly that in countries where you drive on the right-hand side of the road, children immediately deduce that the bus is traveling to the left.
This seems nonsensical to me because it's not even clear the bus is on a road, or it it is, that it's on the far side of the road. As far as I can tell, the bus is in a dirt field. Or if it's a dirt road, there clearly seems to be enough space for another bus to pass behind it.
And since there are no citations, I actually don't even believe it. I've seen enough completely made-up statistics on LinkedIn blogs that unless there's a link to a study, at this point I assume the authors are just making sh*t up.
And, knowing that we are looking at the driver's side because of the absence of doors, the answer depends on which side of the road the bus is designed to be driven on.
I mean I can't even tell. Because no bus looks the way the bus in the image looks.
I've never in my life seen a bus where the windshield was the same size and shape as the back window. Never in my life seen a bus that didn't have brake lights or turn signals. And so forth.
In other words, there are so many things wrong with the "bus" that I don't know why you'd assume that if the "artist" had drawn it from the other side they would have bothered to include a door.
Kids immediately recognize the view must be from the driver's side of the bus because they're not examining the situation. They're taking the first piece of relevant information and rolling with it. No door means passengers get on the other side, so it's going whatever way you assume traffic across the street should go based on where you live.
Honestly, this image is a terrible example to illustrate their point. I think it's more likely that children are more likely to actually use public transit, which is why they'd be able to detect the missing door quickly.
This kind of "research" does not really warrant the amount of inspirational blog posts that has resulted from it. In fact, as an adult I tend to reject 80% of these stories as nonsense.
For me, looking at the image, I have to suspend disbelief about a lot of things. This is a very simplified picture of a bus, lots of elements are missing/unrealistic, so I have to try to determine what missing things are part of the puzzle and which things are just coincidence. I think children would not be able to suspend their disbelief as quickly, and will instead immediately map the image to the real world object. They don't notice that the back bumper and the front bumper are identical (which they shouldn't be) or that the back window and the front window are identical (which they shouldn't be). So looking at this image, I decided "ok so this isn't meant to be a real bus, it's some sort of puzzle, so let me look for clues about it's direction of motion."
That first part, "this isn't meant to be a real bus", is the piece that causes the difference, I believe. It's that thinking that makes it difficult to think "well what's on the other side of the bus?", because who knows, this bus doesn't have real world bumpers who knows if it has real world doors. As an adult, we can abstract and reason about a theoretical bus that might not have doors, whereas I think a child would connect that to the concrete bus and have difficulty abstracting.
Ask a 6-year old to spot a bird in a tree a hundred feet away and they’ll be looking around everywhere for it simply because they don’t know what they’re looking for. An adult knows exactly what to look for: a dark shape in the branches moving separately from the motion of the branches in the wind behind it, briefly silhouetted against the sky while those same branches move, probably 30 ft or higher off the ground (depending on the size of the tree, of course). You probably even know instinctively what size of thing you’re looking for based on your knowledge of the apparent angular size of a bird at a given distance you’re also instinctively able to estimate.
The concept that the only ‘wrong’ thing to do is to do nothing is a real important thing to internalize as an adult - not always where professional work is concerned, but nearly always where artistic pursuits are concerned. You’re doing it ‘right’ if you’re doing it.
My cod-biological explanation is that a child's brain is still forming connections and the process of becoming an adult involves pruning many of these connections to become more focused and efficient.
You might be associating orange with Friday because it makes you think of the sun and going outdoors?
It's all very interesting. Even more so because I don't think of days/colours. My mind gives the days size and mass. ie. starting with Sunday (I'm American) the day is small. And as the week progresses the days get larger, heavier and denser. Until Saturday, which is a big fat puffy ball of "day". You can do what you want with it and it will just be there and be your friend. I love Saturdays.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but it loves a rainbow.
It's a fun little memory trick, and it was surprising to learn that it's not a universal experience. Not just "your letter-color association is different from mine" (it seems to be highly personal) but "wait, you don't do that at all?"
(there is a radio program i listen to where the guy talks about the music he plays and the context and he explains many things in this sort of "bridging sensory modalities" sort of way. and i used to always think, "that is just some straight up nonsense that he is saying." but now, i often see what he is saying very literally...)
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.
Does this effect have a name?
Edit, found it another way: "Irreversible binomial" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_binomial
“Chicken and egg”
“Cookies and cream”
“Heaven and Earth”
“Chapter and verse”
Seems like some phrases just are a certain way, and inverting them sounds wrong just because that’s what we’re used to hearing.
Leaving aside the effect of prosody mentioned in another comment, I think the rest of it is habit, together with the brain's tendency to group things. If you're used to hearing "plus or minus", your brain may be grouping it together into a phrase whose meaning you understand directly without decomposition, so if you hear "minus or plus" there's a moment of having to map the components to the composite meaning, together with wondering if the speaker intends the difference to have a meaning.
(In mathematics, there's a reason to have both ± and ∓, since you can use them both in the same equation when you need "minus when the other one is plus, and plus when the other one is minus". For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".)
I don't know if this has a name, but if it does I'd love to know it.
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.
The fact I made that mistake in the first place just makes me more convinced the original form is unnecessarily complex to parse.
(-b ± sqrt(b² - 4ac)) / 2a = 2c / (-b ∓ sqrt(b² - 4ac))"two or three" means "likely two, maybe three"
Here, the ordering is significant and has nothing to do with a habit.
What I described is how this construct is used in every place I lived.
Are you sure that other people actually mean this when they say it, or are you just adding the extra connotation in your head?
Also I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say "three or two". That sounds weird, like saying "fork and knife".
Not that it's commonly used and not with 3 and 2 specifically, but when used and the pair is inverted, it's meant to convey that the former is more likely. That's just like ... common sense, really.
If I'm describing a large, heavy, square, shiny, metal, block - that's the order that feels right for me. If I try shifting any pair of those around it just feels weird and the farther apart they appear in my original ordering, the weirder the swap would feel for me. "square metal heavy shiny large block" has awful 'mouthfeel', as it were. It's also a bit jarring to hear aloud.
Is a big shiny square metal block the same thing as a big square shiny metal block? I’m not sure. I think the former is a big square metal block which happens to also be shiny, while the latter is a big square block made of a shiny type of metal.
Does that make any sense at all?
1. Quantity or number (e.g., “two”)
2. Quality or opinion (e.g., “lovely”)
3. Size (e.g., “big”)
4. Age (e.g., “old”)
5. Shape (e.g., “round”)
6. Color (e.g., “red”)
7. Origin (e.g., “French”)
8. Material (e.g., “wooden”)
9. Purpose (e.g., “sleeping” in “sleeping bag”)
These exceptions tend to arise with stock phrases such as “hex nut” or “little black dress”. In that case the entire phrase, including adjectives, is treated as the noun, with additional adjectives prepended.
I would have thought that little black designer dress was correct. Designer little black dress feels incorrect. The L and BL in Little and black and then the Ds in designer and dress also lend an alliterative flow to “little black designer dress” that is not there for “designer little black dress”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_black_dress
So I think a little black designer dress would be a designer dress which happened to be little and black. A designer little black dress would be a dress of the “little black dress,” variety, which also has the trait “designer” applied.
The shape with sharp, jagged edges would occur in real life if it were made of some hard material, perhaps, like glass, metal, etc. The shape with the soft, curvy lines would occur if it were made of something softer and possibly elastic.
It doesn't take much intuition to guess that the sharper shape will produce a sound closer to "ki," with sharp transients and lots of high frequencies - like a piece of glass or metal falling - and the rounded one perhaps closer to "bou," with softer transients and perhaps a time-varying resonant frequency as the shape is malleable (think of the sound of a drop of water landing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_script#Ul...
Particularly, the degree of sharpness or roundness of a particular letter may have changed a lot over time. I guess it's still possible that there's been some kind of psychological effect at certain times, but it doesn't look like it was a strong and consistent factor in the history of the alphabet.
Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. - Nonsense, mama is an easier syllable for mouths to make, that's the sound that cats make as well as cows.
Which is to say - there's no single "first syllable" and "second syllable" that all babies say in that exact order. They just babble, and adults interpret those noises as syllables according to the phonemics of their language. Thus results may vary.
- BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/408945/boubakiki
- Kickstarter (Funded): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grandgamersguild/bouba-...
The cards in the game have nonsense words and illustrations. Players work through various scenarios where they try to agree about which nonsense words should go with which illustrations.
(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 nature, smooth curves and such, is empirically more relaxing for people than artificial environments..?)
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
Guess it would have lots of overtones / not a smooth signal curve (Fourier duality)
When we talk about music, layers or tracks or whatever you want to call them always become a thing.
For the sound nerds: A spectrum representation also does not reflect how we experience sound. We humans/animals are so trained or born to distinguish sound sources by timbre. A spectrum analyser splits it on the spectrum of tones, not the spectrum of timbres, therefor it's still not a good representation.
You're able to recognize red, you're unable to tell me it's wavelength (intuitively)
Humans are born with the capability of doing a mechanical Fourier decomposition in our ears. Knowing the amplitude at each frequency, as all humans that can hear do, gives us information about the waveform.
Sensing timbre therefore is information about the waveform. We do not have complete information (e.g. we do not sense all the phase information) but we have approximate information about the time-domain waveform.
Bouba/Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703 - July 2021 (94 comments)
Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372550 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
I don't think I'm alone in this: I googled Kepick and Oona and found a reference from a 2012 blogpost: https://nwccapstone.blogspot.com/2012/02/meet-oona-and-kepic...
So I have to ponder how bouba/kiki diverged into kepick/oona. Kinda wonder if some random schoolteacher remembered the study but didn't remember the exact names, substituted something similar, and then built it into a curriculum that got picked up by the education system.
"Kepick" sounds like a lockpicking tool, which also tends to be sharp and pointy.
Humans have a psychoacoustic effect that makes higher pitch sounds perceived as being louder.
When somethting has a louder intial sound, but the transient sound is about the same, it makes it feel more snappy (like a snare, versus a kick). This is reminiscent of a jagged edge.
I am curious about something with German, and would love feedback from native German speakers: “gendering” on German words seems to be largely arbitrary (as opposed to the romantic languages where gendering seems to align with how the culture associates the word to a gender). My suspicion, that has “felt” correct in most cases, is that gendering in German words is largely an artifact of which article sounds the most correct with the word. Sort of how we might use “a/an” with words that have consonant or vowel starting sounds in English.
Is there any truth to this supposition?
ETA: Having said that, certain endings strongly indicate a specific gender, e.g. for masculine: -or, -ling, -ner, -smus, -er, -ich, -ist, -ant, and -us. See e.g. here:
https://grammar.collinsdictionary.com/german-easy-learning/h...
Der Frosch (M, "frog") vs. ta žába (F).
Das Messer (N, "knife") vs. ten nůž (M).
Die Tat (F, "deed, act") vs. ten čin (M).
Strangely, everyone I've asked says they would want to be Bouba. No one wants to be Kiki.
I don't have tattoos. I don't really want them (I appreciate the artistry of them, but I can't stand seeing things on my skin). I don't know why I should care, never mind care the opposite way of most people.
I had the biggest conundrum as a child. I remembered my grandmother had two dolls on her shelf, one pink and one blue. One tall and thin, one short and fat.
I also remembered that the colors "matched" the body types.
But I can't for the life of me remember if it was "pink = tall and slim" and "blue = short and fat" or the other way round. Both make sense! It's like a synesthesia blue/gold dress, all happening inside my head!
As an adult, if I try to more strongly tap into my flavour of synesthesia, it starts to feel "made up"; Example, if I query my brain for "what's associated with 2" the response will be "orange, (but I think I just generated that now)" so I sadly kind of dismiss it.
Kuchi <> Kiki Banthu <> Bouba
"?" is bouba "!" is kiki
But that post did make me think of this effect, especially as another character in the game is named "Keke"
It would be pretty mind-blowing if it still worked.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.039...
Chinese/English speakers also seem to map the shapes differently to tone contours: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
(Note that this article contains some tangible object instantiation of the bouba/kiki forms.)