Author Archives: Aliyah Auerbach

A name is a very important way to distinguish people, yet a very arbitrary and random measure. When you think of your own name, I doubt you even think twice. It has been with you all your life and you’ve learned, very early on, that it is specifically associated with you. As you’ve progressed through life, you have no doubt interacted with people of all different names, all of whom have played different roles in your life.

Me and my roommates on a weekend trip to Belgium. After a month of living in Paris with them, I know their names and share the experiential connection of this program with them.

When it comes to strangers, however, we have no connections that tell us anything about their lives. We know nothing about who they are, yet there can be something in their face that makes us randomly associate them with a name. Personally, whenever I’m at the airport for a long time, I resort to people-watching: I do not know the man who passes me, yet I feel as though his name must be something like “Bob”, or “Lou”. How can I possibly make such an association with a complete stranger?

As it turns out, the answer may have to do with cross-modal communication. Originally it was thought that this kind of “arbitrary connection” sort of communication existed only in the rarest cases, such as a person with synesthesia (individuals who experience activation of one seemingly unrelated sense when another is activated). However, an experiment known as the Bouba-Kiki effect served to change the public view on cross-modality between senses.

The Bouba-Kiki Effect: Which of these two objects seems more like a Bouba? Which do you see as Kiki?

Observing the figure above, which of the two shapes do you feel is Bouba? Which would you call Kiki? The answer seems to come easily, doesn’t it? Turns out, the vast majority of people who took this test called the figure on the left Bouba and the one on the right Kiki. If there was truly no association between this unknown shape and these seemingly arbitrary names, how could a majority of people consistently come to the same conclusion?

The Bouba-Kiki effect describes this phenomenon in which names are randomly assigned to abstract shapes in a systematic manner (Cuskley, Simner, and Kirby, 2017).  In the example above, Bouba is a name that requires the mouth to form a rounder shape. Bouba sounds softer and more rotund, and the physical sensation of saying this name aligns with the rounder and gentler abstract shape on the left. Saying Kiki induces sharper pointed sounds, such as how the abstract shape on the right is physically spiky and harsh. These results indicate that we may all have synesthetic tendencies and make arbitrary connections between different types of data.

Figure: Example stimuli faces shown during the Barton Bouba-Kiki experiment

Even though it may seem like a stretch, a recent study by Barton and Halberstadh (2017) seeks to prove that this random association is also present when we are identifying the faces of complete strangers. In this experiment, participants were shown a set of random faces that were either quite angular or quite round (see above), and they were asked to randomly assign names to these faces, in ranked order. Six names were available to choose: Jono, George and Lou were the “round” names, while Mickey, Kirk, and Pete were the “pointy” names.

After 20 randomized trials in which participants ranked names for these face stimuli, a significance was found for sharper faces (those on the left of the above figure) that were named from the “pointy” name category, as well as for rounder faces (those on the right of the above figure) named from the “round” name category. This means that the odds of naming a face with its correspondingly sharp or round name are greater than random chance.

Figure: Senatorial candidates and their name-face association. A higher score represents POORER fit between name and face, while lower score represents HIGHER fit between name and face.

These connections between face shape and name identification have interesting implications. Are peoples’ names completely arbitrary? According to the figure above, Bob Weygand would have a social advantage over Rocky Raczkowski due to a better fit between name and face. Socially, certain face shapes carry expectations about the attached name; when these expectations are violated, more complex social judgments take place about the quality of that person’s character (Barton and Halberstadh, 2017). It has been shown that people who “match” with their name (in terms of the distinctions mentioned above) are generally seen as having a character consistent with their name and appearance. For example, in the political sphere, candidates with well-fitting names tend to win their seats by about a 10-point margin as compared with competing politicians (Barton and Halberstadh, 2017).

So there you have it! Your face might give people a clue as to what your name could be, and you may get an innate social advantage by having a high association between your face and your name. Looks like our parents had a lot to consider when they chose our names!

Sources:

Barton, D. N., & Halberstadt, J. (2017). A social Bouba/Kiki effect: A bias for people whose names match their faces. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25(3), 1013-1020. doi:10.3758/s13423-017-1304-x

Cuskley, C., Simner, J., & Kirby, S. (2015). Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect. Psychological Research, 81(1), 119-130. doi:10.1007/s00426-015-0709-2

Roommate picture: From Me

Bouba-Kiki picture: https://www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/media-guide-the-bouba-kiki-effect/

Both Face Stimuli pictures: Barton and Halberstadh (cited above)

During the day, Paris is a bustling metropolitan city, housing thousands of people as they take to the streets on their way to work. Once the sun sets, however, I begin to understand why this is the City of Lights. The Eiffel Tower lights up much of the night sky, twinkling at the onset of each new hour. While daytime bakeries close, late-night restaurants and cafes open their doors to the evening-inclined general public. On late night walks back to my apartment, I never fail to notice Parisian couples lounging at an outdoor café, enjoying the nighttime air with a drink and a pastry. Here, it seems to be a widely recognized and embraced concept that Parisians are night-folk.

Long after the sun sets, the lights of Paris are still up and brighter than ever. View from a street corner blocks from the Eiffel Tower.

This is a far cry from the nighttime environment in my hometown, a city on the outskirts of the Metro Atlanta area. I was always used to complete darkness at night, with no late-night city life to brighten the night sky. Even in Atlanta lights don’t shine quite as brightly. While I think the Parisian street scene is charming and I absolutely adore its thriving nightlife, it has left me struggling to get to sleep in the city where the lights never fade.  I’ve only been here a month, but I wonder how all of this consistent light affects the sleeping patterns of the average Parisian relative to the people living in smaller, less heavily lit areas. Does the constant exposure to bright city lights at night-time in cities like Paris result in later sleep cycles that significantly differ from populations living in areas with less nighttime light pollution?

To answer this question, it is important to understand how variation in sleep cycles is defined. People can be sorted into two groups based on their times of wakefulness and alertness – “morning” or “evening” type people. These distinctions refer to a person’s chronotype, which measures individual differences in lifestyle and alertness in the morning versus the evening (Sun 2019). Morning-type people are more likely to get up earlier and exercise more, while evening-types typically go to sleep later, eat later, and wake up later. Based on the social environment alone, Paris seems to encourage more evening-oriented people.

Both chronotypes depends on chemical signaling in the brain to fall asleep at their respective times. Sleep relies on a neurotransmitter known as melatonin, a hormone operating in synchronicity with the onset of nighttime darkness. Melatonin is important for regular and consistent sleep, and delays in its release are expected to play a role in sleep disorders such as insomnia (Shechter 2018). This means that any factor that influences the release of melatonin prolongs wakefulness at night and causes difficulties in getting to sleep. One factor that has continuously shown associations with these delays is presence of light during and leading up to sleep (Shechter 2018). If light is present on a consistent basis, the regular delay of melatonin can cause an adjustment in chronotype towards being more evening inclined. In addition to delaying melatonin production, light alerts parts of the brain that control initiation and maintenance of sleep. (Sun 2019).

As shown above, melatonin is active in the dark. Presence of light inhibits the melatonin pathway and delays sleep.

A study compared circadian patterns between residents of a rural town and members of a small urban area (Carvalho 2013). They had a similar question, and collection of data involved comparison of light exposure and sleep patterns, as well as a structured chronotype questionnaire. The results they obtained show a significant difference between rural and urban populations in spread of chronotypes: the rural subjects showed a predominantly morning chronotype while the urban subjects were predominantly evening-oriented.

As shown above, there is a significantly difference between rural and urban subjects with regards to chronotype.

Their reasoning was that rural workers are exposed to sunlight during the day while they work, which reinforces the need to sleep when the sun goes down. Since urban citizens typically do not work outside, in-the-sun jobs, they are not exposed to as much natural sunlight and do not have their sleep cycles naturally reinforced. Instead, they tend to work technology-based jobs where they are at a computer screen (Carvalho 2014). This results in increased intake of bright and unnatural light, which is independent of the actual daylight (as one can use a computer at night). This would align with the Parisian lifestyle of bright light that is inconsistent with the light of the sun, which tampers with the natural sleep cycle. This reasoning was a strength of the study and proved their conclusion with valid evidence.

A weakness of this study was that it failed to address the possibility of other factors that may have influenced their data. The results they received were very strong, but the influence of light could have been a correlation instead of a causation. They made no effort to test for other variables that may have impacted results, such as timing of social events, parents with young children who require continuous attention, and other non-light related factors.

Based on these results, it looks like the late-night hustle and bustle does have a neurological effect on sleeping patterns. While it doesn’t hurt to be on the computer past sunset, it is clear that continued light during nighttime delays melatonin release on a consistent scale, which can result in the shifting of sleep cycles to an evening chronotype. Turns out there may be some nighttime benefits to living in small towns after all!

References:

Carvalho, F. G., Hidalgo, M. P., & Levandovski, R. (2014). Differences in circadian patterns between rural and urban populations: An epidemiological study in countryside. Chronobiology International, 31(3), 442-449.

Shechter, A., Kim, E. W., St-Onge, M., & Westwood, A. J. (2018). Blocking nocturnal blue light for insomnia: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 96, 196-202.

Sun, J., Chen, M., Cai, W., Wang, Z., Wu, S., Sun, X., & Liu, H. (2019). Chronotype: Implications for sleep quality in medical students. Chronobiology International, 1-9.