Let anyone who has never discreetly shaken a Christmas present to guess its contents throw us the first tangerine. However, know this: everyone sees you, and can even tell the type of information you are trying to get about your gift by the way you wave it!
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You’re never more transparent than when you’re trying to guess what’s behind gift wrapping! Researchers at Johns Hopkins University conducted experiments on hundreds of people who observed others trying to guess the contents of boxes. Within seconds, most of them were able to determine whether the person shaking the box was trying to find out the number of objects inside or the shape of the objects.
If the boxes unfortunately did not contain Christmas presents, the researchers say the results would be the same under the tree as in a laboratory. “The way you shake a gift to tell if it is one thing or many things, or how big it is, can vary slightly, laughs the doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study Sholei Croom in a press release. People are incredibly good at perceiving such subtleties! »
Better understand the interactions between vision and thought
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is less naive than it seems. It is even the first to demonstrate that people can know what others are trying to learn simply by observing their actions. “What our work shows is that your mind is capable of grasping the information that others are looking for, details Chaz Firestone, one of the authors and assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences. Just as they can guess what’s inside the box by shaking it, you can sense what they’re trying to figure out when they shake it. If you are doubtful, the arrival of Christmas should allow you to verify the information for yourself.
