Why do post-partum women see faces everywhere?

Y'all. This is a statsy example featuring sensation and perception, developmental, and neuroscience.

The study found that post-partum, but not pregnant, women, saw faces where there were no faces (pareidolia illusion). It is attributed to the endogenous oxytocin bump women experience after they have babies. Here is a link to Newsweek's treatment of the study and the actual study.

Here are some examples of the photos used in the experiment. They are so dear because I see faces.

I think my favorite is the clothes washer. Anyway, the researchers used pregnant women, post-partum women, and a control group and measured how often they saw faces.

How to use

1. There is a good ol' Mann-Whitney U in this study. Making this the first ever Mann-Whitney U featured on the blog.

2. The researchers used OSF, and the data is available.

3. I like the growing trend of pairing newer and older data visualizations. Here, bar graphs and jitter plots are used to illustrate the same data, and you can really see how the jitter plot does a better job at conveying variance in the data.

4. The Newsweek coverage is nice because a) there is an audio portion you could play in class and b) the scientists talk about HOW they came to this hypothesis to test. I think young psychologists need to hear more of these stories.

5. There is a factorial ANOVA in there, too.

Comments

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If your students get the joke, they get statistics.

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