
How Niko Tinbergen Reverse Engineered the Seagull - rms
http://www.dustincurtis.com/4.html
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sachinag
First, I'm really intrigued by the design choices made on the page - the red
line and the fact that the page is a good 1280 px wide (I have a 1280x800
pixel monitor and had a horizontal scrollbar). There's something absolutely
brilliant about how the red line on the left reinforces the key insight of the
research. (And it exactly matches up with the part of the text that would
maximize that reinforcement.) The page width, I don't get - but Dustin's a
design stud and I'm not a stud of any sort.

Second, I suppose we could end up at optimal designs for what we wanted
through iterative A/B testing. Given enough time, enough variations, and
enough traffic, you could conceivably come to the ideal webpage for conversion
(of whatever metric you wanted). Of course, as people change, the page would
have to change as well. The Gladwell article posted earlier today is a good
companion read to this piece, I thought.

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tel
For me, the extra width worked rather well. When I first hit the site, the
sidebar was hidden and I focused entirely on the article. At the end, I
noticed the little white arrow cue and scrolled over to get extra information
about Dustin and his website.

I'm not certain if this was a premeditated design choice, but it actually
played out very nicely.

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anthropocentric
Robert Cialdini covers a similar experiment with turkeys in his excellent
book, "Influence - The Psychology of persuasion"

For example, mother turkeys, who are known to be caring parents (as far as
birds go), tend to respond only to the "cheep-cheep" sound of their chicks.

"Hearing the cheep-cheep, the mother turkey coddles and cares for the young
turkey chick. It is a short-cut response that nature has given turkeys to know
how to behave. It tends to work well in nature. But, tricky scientists
recorded the cheep-cheep sound and placed the recording into a stuffed
Polecat, the natural enemy of the turkey, and found that the mother turkeys
adopted the stuffed polecat. Coddled it and cared for it."

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captainobvious
Human babies have similar innate behaviors (a quickly growing shape, say a
circle, will cause a fear reaction in a newborn baby).*

* Chomsky - Language and Responsibility - p52

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robertk
Wait, why? (the part in parentheses)

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bd
Quickly growing shape in front of your eyes is a good heuristics to indicate
that something is going to hit you in the head.

Incidentally, that's why I never liked ball games.

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davi
Good stuff. Brings to mind classic Hubel & Wiesel work on receptive field
structure of single neurons in the visual system:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw5PKV9Rj3o&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw5PKV9Rj3o&feature=related)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDJSnJ2cIFc>

<http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/b18.htm>

[edit: Wiesel, not Weisel]

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aristus
Physical ident is more efficient and flexible than construct ident, eh? That's
always made intuitive sense to me (eg the ident mechanism of the mousetrap),
but I've never seen it explained so clearly.

(cue pun about "duck typing")

I think you are right that this has implications for a lot of things, not
least graphic design. If you have a good grasp of how people respond to
different elements you could guide their actions even more than now.

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jm3
cite your sources? :)

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dcurtis
Sure.

I first learned about the research from a brief footnote in the book Phantoms
in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran (highly recommended). Then I spent quite a
long time looking for the article sourced, by Tinbergen, which is:

Tinbergen N., and Perdeck, A.C. (1950). On the stimulus situation releasing
the begging response in the newly hatched Herring Gull chick (Larus Argentatus
argentalus Pont). Behavior 3:1-39

Took me forever to track this article down, so if you want a copy, ping me.

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robertk
Here it is!

<http://therobert.org/stuff/tinbergen_article.pdf> (20MB)

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dcurtis
Awesome! Sadly, I don't have academic access anymore, which is why it was hard
for me to find.

Also, it's copyrighted so I figured linking to it might be morally dubious.

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rms
_cough_ scribd _cough_

