For those who need another reason, beyond the ick factor, to not eat raw crawfish, here’s a frightening fact: many of these crunchy crustaceans carry the infinitely more icky lungworms – which can burrow from your digestive tract into your lungs, cheeks, or even your brain.

A new government report describes the cases of nine Missouri folks whose bodies were invaded by the parasitic little flat worms, officially known as paragonimus kellicotti, after gobbling down raw crawfish on a drunken dare.

All nine got infected with paragoniumus between 2009 and 2010. Before that, there had been just seven cases reported between 1968 and 2008, according to the new report published this week in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal. Why the upsurge? Turns out that people in the country’s interior like to cool off by rafting down rivers -- which are populated by crawfish. And someone, somewhere, got the brilliant idea to dare a friend to gobble down a live one.

“What we’ve seen is that out on rivers people like to drink and do some things we might not normally do,” says study co-author Michael A. Lane, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Washington University School of Medicine. “We’ve seen a decent – though still relatively small – number of people eating raw crawfish on a dare after drinking beer.”

If you’re having trouble imagining someone consuming a live crawfish, just type the words “eating raw crawfish” into the search bar on YouTube and you’ll see plenty of people crunching away. Best to do this on an empty stomach. 

Scientists have discovered that many of the crawfish in Missouri’s rivers are infected with lungworms. “In some rivers as few as 40 percent of the crawfish had the parasite,” Lane says. “But in others it was as high as 70 percent. So, if you pull a crawfish out of the water, you’ve got a high likelihood of getting one with the parasite.”

The parasites are about the size of a grain of rice when they’re in a crawfish, Lane says. But they can grow as big as a half an inch once they’re inside the human body.

“After you eat the crawfish, the parasite comes out and migrates across the diaphragm,” Lane explains. “They burrow through the walls of the intestine, hoping to make it to the lungs where they can complete their life cycle and mature. Once in the lungs they form nodules that mature and grow. But sometimes they get lost on the way to the lungs and they can end up in other places. One of our patients had one that had gone to the brain. Another had one that had worked its way to the cheek.”

Lane’s study only looked at people who had been seen at his medical center, but Missouri isn’t the only place with hot weather, rivers and crawfish.

“All the pieces of the parasite’s life cycle are found throughout the country,” Lane points out. “There have been animal studies that have found them in Ohio, Colorado, and other places.”

Because of that, Lane suspects there may be even more cases of people out there with paragonimus symptoms – coughing, fever, shortness of breath, high white blood cell count, fluid in and around the lungs - who are being misdiagnosed with anything from tuberculosis to pneumonia to cancer.

And the misdiagnoses may cause more damage than the worm itself. One of Lane’s patients was on the verge of getting treated for cancer because doctors assumed that had to be the problem.

“He’d had multiple procedures for draining the fluid from his lungs – which eventually caused one of his lungs to collapse,” Lane says.

Another patient had a healthy gallbladder removed when doctors couldn’t find any other explanation for his chest pain.

The good news is that there is a very effective therapy. When patients take the medication praziquantel for three days, there is a 100 percent cure rate, Lane says.

The tricky thing is for doctors to first figure out whether a patient has the parasite since there is no good blood test.

“Probably the best diagnostic test we have is to ask the patient if they ate any raw crawfish,” Lane says. 

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U.S. swimmer Garrett Weber-Gale (L), shown with Michael Phelps, demonstrates the universal and time honored signal for victory at the Beijing Olympic Games on August 11, 2008.

Flat screens, phones and laptops soon will blaze with a body-language blitz: sweaty palms clasping mouths in disbelief, muscled arms folded in disagreement and – the sweetest Olympic pose – two fists hoisted aloft in displays of golden bliss.

“That position – the arms raised high – evokes triumph and it’s very ancient,” says Margaret J. King, director of the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis in Philadelphia.

That traditional victory stance, rooted in the older, limbic portion of our brains where base emotions are fueled, may have been flashed when the earliest humans celebrated their first conquests, King suggests. Simply put, it pretty much predates Rocky,  "The Breakfast Club" and Notre Dame's "Touchdown Jesus." 

“I’m a cultural analyst but I use anthropology and I would bet that comes from a good hunt, from having successfully hunted and killed prey,” King said. “The Plains Indians’ dances used this as well, where the arms were over the heads, and that’s really, really important for group morale: ‘We won!’ ”

Scholars speculate that Neanderthals some 30,000 years ago had neck structures that gave them the ability to produce sounds similar to modern humans. If that’s so, why is body language still such a rich and vital part of our communication? Why didn’t evolution long ago wean away our need to silently reveal our inner feelings through postures and gestures?

“We still use body language because that’s the way our brains worked (eons) years ago when we first became human,” King said. “That brain is still ticking away; all research based on evolutionary psychology demonstrates that we are living in the 21st century with that same ancestral brain. This is what is called hard wiring. We still have the same bodily workshop. We just do different stuff in that workshop.”

“Body language is not an either-or situation,” adds Dennis Kravetz, a Scottsdale-Ariz.-based psychologist who specializes in male-female communication and body language. “If speech is more sophisticated than body language, then why haven’t chimps, dogs, and other animals developed speech as part of their evolutionary history? Rather, body language enhances communication.”

Evolution may have stripped away many outmoded human parts and proclivities that we no longer need but body language remains an essential tool in our modern communication kit, both Kravetz and King contend.

“We send out signals because that's the way it has worked for millennia: anything human beings have been doing for that long is not likely to change anytime soon,” King said. “It’s the language of sociability: You can tell if someone likes you. Can we work together? Can I trust you?

“We’re looking at body signals all the time to tell, first of all, if people are safe or unsafe. That’s one of the first things we look for in business is trust - is this a safe person to deal with?”

Likewise, if someone is marrying into a family, that person’s initial body language is carefully scanned by the family, she added, as they “look for the signals that say this is a consistent person, or that his words and language are not matching his body language, meaning he is not a person you can trust.”

Fair enough, but according to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, certain traits are passed from generation to generation that allow human offspring to be better suited to survive this world. How does unintentionally broadcasting your anger, sadness or frustration through “negative body language” help you – or your great-great grandchildren – endure? Why hasn’t evolution sapped those awkward poses (hands on hips, crossed arms) from our nonverbal playbook?

While those signals subliminally convey bad feelings, they also alert others around us – hopefully friends or colleagues – that the person fidgeting, fumbling or looking forlorn may be in some emotional trouble. These unintended expressions are, in a sense, silent 911 calls.

“Communicating anxiety or sadness is not bad at all,” said Kravetz, author of "Relating Effectively.” "These are just as important … as feeling happy, excited and other positive states of mind. Body language helps us more fully communicate with another humans irrespective of what we are (saying).”

And in the workplace, if such “negative” body language is expressed among close company allies, “the sense of the group is: this guy is frustrated; something is off base here,” King said. “It’s a signal that the group needs to address this issue together – that we need to do something

“We have to work in teams. Human life is highly social and highly territorial. It explains a lot of our behavior,” she added. But like our ancient ancestors, "body language helps us relate to other people.”

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It's not that he's untrustworthy, it's just that he's thinking.

Whenever I’ve watched video of myself on TV, I think I look shifty-eyed. I’m asked a question and my eyes dart away from the camera into which I’ve been told to look. At the time, I don’t know I’m doing it, but I am.

Psychology professor Howard Ehrlichman of Queens College, City University of New York, has been studying eye movement since the 1970s. In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, he reviewed some of his work, including recent findings, and argued there’s robust evidence that I’m not being shifty-eyed at all. I’m just thinking. More specifically, I'm accessing long-term memory.

“There’s no way to prove this is universal,” Ehrlichman says. “But I can say that you can see it just by looking at people on TV, and in interviews. I am convinced it is universal.”

Ehrlichman is referring to saccades, rapid eye movements that disengage the focus of one’s vision, often moving down and away from, say, the eyes of a person to whom you are talking. Or a TV camera.

Over the years, there have been a number of seemingly logical explanations for the darting eye phenomenon. Humans place great importance on the eyes of others -- it’s part of how we determine friend from foe or intuit what others are thinking. Because this requires brain power and focus, many believe we have to disengage in order to direct our thoughts elsewhere. Another theory suggests that the direction of eye movement is related to the hemisphere of the brain we're accessing. That idea even showed up as a plot point in an episode of “The Mentalist.”

Sadly, Ehrlichman, says, “people in law enforcement do believe that,” and think they can tell if somebody is telling the truth or not. But during his work for his Ph.D. dissertation he found little evidence to support the idea.

In fact, Ehrlichman’s research shows that these eye movements have nothing at all to do with vision or hemispheres. He speculates the intermittent eye movements are an evolutionary holdover.

Most animals are what Ehrlichman calls “sensory/motor machines.” They are constantly scanning and reacting to the environment, looking for food, say, or trying to avoid danger. When they find what they are looking for, they fixate on it.

Our brain’s long-term memory is like an internalized landscape. We don’t need our eyes to scan it, but “our eyes go along for the ride,” Ehrlichman says, even if we’re not looking for anything visual.

Ehrlichman and his colleagues proved the saccades are unrelated to actual vision by putting people in dark rooms, alone. “We see this effect even if they have closed eyes and they have nothing to disengage from,” he says. “The pattern is the same as when people are sitting with their eyes open.”

In one experiment, subjects were asked to name things according to visual properties, like “green” or “triangular” versus naming words meaning the same as “pleasant.” The visually-related items like “green” evoked no eye movement. But when subjects searched their brain data banks for words matching pleasant, the saccades were obvious.

Similarly, when subjects were asked to visualize their living room and describe it, which you’d think would lead to lots of eye movement as they mentally scanned the room, there was virtually no saccade activity.

“We think once they retrieve the image, they can move through it without searching long-term memory,” Ehrlichman explains.

On the other hand, when an answer to a question is right in front of us, say if we’ve just rehearsed a Q and A, we don’t need to scan our internal memory landscape. We can pop out an answer to a question and maintain our focus.

So rather then being shifty, eye movements could actually mean somebody -- including yours truly -- is simply being thoughtful. 

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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Sunburns readily advertise that we've had fun in the sun, and perhaps have been a bit careless, but what exactly goes on in our cells to produce the painful, red inflammation has not been clear.

Now, researchers have discovered a molecular signal that triggers sunburns.

When our skin cells are exposed to ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation , a specific form of RNA, called micro-RNA, is damaged, the study found. (RNA is similar in structure to DNA, which makes up our genes.)

This damaged RNA is then released as a signal of solar injury, and prompts neighboring, healthy cells to stimulate the production of factors that promote inflammation, the researchers said.

The entire process is intended to remove sun-damaged cells, which could turn cancerous if not cleared away.

"The cells of our skin can sense dead, [sun-damaged] cells, because the cells release damaged RNA," said study researcher Dr. Richard Gallo, professor of medicine at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

While other factors likely play a role in the inflammatory process we see as a sunburn, the findings suggest the damaged RNA molecules serve as a marker for radiation-caused injury, the researchers said. 

 Why Sunburns Hurt ]

The findings may have implications for medical conditions, the researchers said.

For example, one treatment for the skin condition psoriasis is exposure to UV light. But while the light can relieve symptoms, it also increases skin cancer risk, Gallo said. The new findings suggest that certain RNA molecules could be used in place of UV therapy, and produce the same benefit, Gallo said.

In addition, people with certain autoimmune conditions get a burning sensation with very little exposure to UV light, before unhealthy cell damage has occurred, Gallo said. Blocking the micro-RNA pathway may be a way to reduce inflammation in these patients, Gallo said.

However, healthy people without such conditions would not want to block this pathway just to prevent sunburn, because it is an important way for the body to heal and get rid of damaged cells, Gallo said.

"The inflammatory response is a normal part of our protection against the sun," Gallo said.

The study is published online today (July 8) in the journal Nature Medicine.

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The movie "Titanic," starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo Dicaprio, launched an ocean of tears that swept the movie right into blockbuster status.

By Meghan Holohan

Ever wonder why people like sad movies, no matter how gut-wrenching they are or how weepy they make you feel?

As a student in South Korea, Dohyun Ahn used to take breaks from studying by watching sad movies such as “Elvira Madigan,” a tragic and true love story of a tightrope walker and a lieutenant. Even though the movie made Ahn feel sad, he’d watch it over and over again. “The film was so sad and at the same time, so enjoyable,” says Ahn, who decided to study “the paradox of enjoyment of a sad film.”

To figure out what makes sob stories so enticing to viewers, Ahn—a senior researcher in the department of interaction science at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea— asked 165 American college students to watch the movie, “Angel Baby,” a love story about two schizophrenic people, Harry and Kate. As the affair continues, Kate becomes pregnant, but dies during labor, leaving Harry alone with their child. 

Following the viewing, the researchers asked the participants, the majority of whom were female, how the movie made them feel, and, specifically, whether it was Harry’s or Kate’s story that made them cry.

What Ahn found was that sadness predicted how the students perceived reality and that watching a sad movie changes how people look at the world. People seek out sad movies to help them understand the world.   

“On its surface, it is counterintuitive. Common [sense dictates that] people feel sad because a tragic story seems to be real. However, people perceive reality because they feel sad,” explains Ahn, whose study was published recently in the Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods and Applications.

Emotions, such as sadness, help people gather information and process it. Using a sad movie as a vehicle to understand the world seemed interesting to Ahn because most tragedies focus on tenderness and love, rather than vengeance or malice. When people watch sad movies, they observe subtle details and see the movie as more realistic, changing how they perceive the world, Ahn says

“Roughly, enjoyment can be classified into two types. One is self-focused, and the other is other-focused. Enjoyment of sad movies are other-focused enjoyment, driven by altruistic motivation,” Ahn says. After seeing a sad movie, people think of others with more empathy and understanding.

While most of the participants were female, Ahn doesn’t think the results would vary for males. He believes that enjoying sad movies is a sign of higher-level thinking.

“Although males and females have different empathic tendency, the variation cannot surpass the level of being human… most humans have experiences in basic emotions such as sadness and empathy.” 

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Questions about sexual desire and love have plagued humans for eons. While poets, musicians, and artists believe love lives in the heart, scientists know it exists in the brain. And sex? Apparently, that urge resides in the "little brain" or the bed or maybe a barn. It gets a little confusing what with those tired old adages about cows and free milk (or pigs and free sausage).

34873.000000 / Getty Images stock

He wants you, but does he love you? A new study finds love and sexual desire are controlled by the same part of the brain.

Now a new study has found that the same regions of the brain that control love also control sex -- indicating that sexual desire can actually morph into love. That's right. If a woman has sex with a man, he might not only buy the cow but love the cow, as well.

“Love and sex are clearly overlapping and they are different,” says Jim Pfaus, a professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal who's been studying love and libidos for more than a decade. “You can have desire for sex without love.”

But sex can also be the start of a beautiful relationship.

How does all of this work?

The brain's insular cortex (or insula) and the striatum play a role in both sexual desire and love. The insula is nestled deep within the cerebral cortex and influences emotions. While the striatum resides in the forebrain and receives messages from the cortex.

In order to map out the location of sexual desire and love, researchers reviewed 20 studies that used fMRI technology. First, they looked at the regions of the brain that lit up when sparked by love. They then compared the findings of all the papers to see what regions were activated when someone felt aroused or amorous.  

What they discovered was a bit surprising -- love and sexual desire both activate the striatum, showing a continuum from sexual desire to love. Each feeling impacts a different area of the striatum.

Sexual desire activates the ventral striatum, the brain’s reward system. When someone enjoys a great dessert or an orgasm, it’s the ventral striatum that flickers with life. Love sparks activity in the dorsal striatum, which is associated with drug addiction.

“You don’t make a connection that love is a drug; it acts just like drug addiction," says Pfaus. "Anyone who has had someone break up with them feels like a drug addict in withdrawal. You end up getting cravings.”

But it doesn't stop there. The researchers also saw an overlap between sexual desire and love in the insula.

“[The insula] translates emotional feelings into meaning,” explains Pfaus. “You take the internal state and give it external meaning.”

The areas of overlap indicate that sexual desire transitions into love in many cases, and the feelings aren’t separate.

“Even love at first sight, can it happen? Of course it can happen," says Pfaus. "And when it does happen, do you want to play Scrabble with each other? When it happens, you normally want to consummate it.”

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Dale "Mouth of the South" Boone, right, and "Gentleman" Joe Menchetti, left, stuff hamburgers in their mouths during a burger eating contest at Z-Burger in Washington D.C. on July 3, 2012.

The Fourth of July means flags and fireworks, and for some, frankfurters. As in rapidly stuffing dozens of them into their mouths in 10 minutes at the Nathan's Famous July Fourth International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Televised live on ESPN, the wiener wolf-down is the Super Bowl of Speed Eating. Watching the annual Coney Island frank fest is both riveting and repulsive as men and women compete for prize money ($10,000 to each first place finisher) and bragging rights for their championship stomachs.

But what price do these "athletes" pay for their gluttonous pig-outs and 15 minutes of frankfurter fame?

"I know it's totally not healthy, but neither is football right now," says Dave "Coondog" O'Karma, who competed at Coney Island in 2001 (finishing seventh) and 2002. He now runs All Pro Eating, which holds "picnic-style" eating contests (competitors must eat the food as they would at a picnic and not dunk it in water or mash it up in order to down it faster).

O'Karma, who is 56, competed against kids half his age. But he says he could always eat a lot of food really fast and never really struggled with his weight.

He did struggle with one contest cornerstone, though. While the former champ once chomped down 27 Krispy Kreme donuts in a minute and a half on live TV, hot dogs nearly did him in.

"I had a hard time with the garlic and the sodium," he says, admitting he would feel "incredibly nauseous and thirsty" afterwards.

Even so, O'Karma says the speed eating contests become a "war between the competitive spirit and common sense." Competitive eaters are not thinking about the health consequences 20 years down the road, he admits.

How do speed eaters do it?

The one study done on a competitive male eater seems to suggest the man had the ability to expand his stomach many times more than a larger person, says Dr. Alphonso Brown, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. (Brown was not involved in the study.)

"Competitors can train their stomach to do this," he says.

Not only can speed eaters' stomachs expand and hold tremendous amounts of food, they also have little to no peristalsis, the rhythmic muscular contractions that move food through the digestive system, explains Brown. This means food can sit in their super-sized stomachs longer than normal eaters before emptying into the small intestine.

"Competitive eaters also appear to lack the signal that tells the brain when the stomach is full," he says. So they can scarf down a world record 68 franks and buns in 10 minutes without feeling full and uncomfortable.

As for the long-term health effects, speed eaters get way too much protein, fat, and sodium. Brown says the closest comparison is studies of people who have followed an Atkins-style diet.

This research suggests that people on high-protein, high-fat eating plans may be at greater risk for high blood pressure, kidney disease, high cholesterol, and possibly diabetes. Plus eating large amounts of red meat may boost the odds for colon cancer.

In addition, once they quit being gustatory athletes, "it's unclear if their stomachs would return to normal," Brown points out.

Considering the potential health risks (not to mention a hot dog's infamous ingredients), why would someone participate in such a gluttonous event?

O'Karma says speed-eating contests make them feel like they're champions, even for a day or an hour, pointing out that most competitors are average people in it for the fun, the camaraderie, the competitive spirit, and of course, the attention.

"It sure beats everyday living," he says. You feel like a celebrity up on the stage, and that gets very addicting."

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News of the death of Andy Griffith set off a strange but understandable reaction within my own brain on Tuesday: I heard whistling.

The short and snappy theme song to "The Andy Griffith Show" is still playing in my head and apparently the heads of those around me, because there's a lot of whistling this morning. It seems like a fitting tribute to the lovable actor everyone knew as the small-town sheriff.

The opening credits to the classic TV show weren't very long. Griffith and little Ronny Howard are seen walking along a dirt path with fishing poles over their shoulders. Opie throws a couple rocks into a river. Griffith, wearing his signature sheriff's uniform, whistles as he walks. And then it's over.

Twenty seconds of TV music and here we are 40-plus years later with an earworm we can't shake. "The Andy Griffith Show" theme is just one in a long line of classic songs that help us remember our favorite programs.

Depending on the era you grew up in and your taste in television, the themes stuck in your head will vary greatly. Here are just a few from my day. Share your favorites over on our Facebook page.

'M*A*S*H'

'CHiPs'

'Happy Days'

'Cheers'

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Steve Buscemi: Cool or uncool?

Bug-eyed, neurotic Steve Buscemi played Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs,” Donny in “The Big Lebowski,” and gangster Tony Blundetto in "The Sopranos” — three characters that exist in the pantheon of cool.

Or maybe not.

Ilan Dar-Nimrod, a post doctoral social psychology researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, doesn’t believe the creepy Buscemi is cool.

On the other hand, his friend, Ian Hansen, an assistant professor of psychology at York College, thinks he is.  

To settle the debate about Buscemi’s cool cred, the two researchers came up with an uncool, albeit scientific, solution: they conducted an empirical investigation into the nature of coolness, just published in the Journal of Individual Differences.  

To get to the heart of cool, the researchers came up with three separate studies. In the first, they asked participants (353 college students from a large Canadian university) to submit words that described cool. In the second, they asked participants to rank how cool or desirable these qualities were.

“We wanted to tease apart coolness and social desirability,” says Dar-Nimrod, who is very aware that his last name is definitely not cool. “There is a lot of overlap between social desirability and coolness.”

In the third and final study, subjects were asked to rank their friends based on these qualities.   

What makes a person cool? The Body Odd scrutinized the paper for suggestions. Although the following traits are actually more desirable than cool (according to the second study), these simple steps will make you what Dar-Nimrod dubs "cachet cool."  

Be hot. When Dar-Nimrod first asked participants what words describe cool, he received myriad responses (1,639 to be exact). But again and again, he encountered words like "hot," "handsome," "beautiful," "cute," and "sexy," with an overall theme of physical attractiveness. People agree that being attractive is cool.

“Our research was kind of designed to see what goes into coolness evaluation,” he says. “What we found was that the dominant perception of coolness is revolving around social desirability and generic semi-gentrified traits.”

Be friendly. Dar-Nimrod believed that coolness would have a rebellious feel to it, a James Dean “Rebel Without a Cause” vibe. What he found instead was that most people believe friendliness constitutes cool.

Be personally competent (successful). Achieving good grades in school or holding down a secure job with a good paycheck feels cool, according to subjects. In fact, being smart or talented was the second most popular suggestion of what cool is (the most noted cool trait was friendliness or popularity). 

Be pro-social. Participants believed people were cool if they volunteered or recycled or joined in socially responsible activities.

Other cool qualities? Trendiness, desirableness, individualism, confidence and, yes, a sense of humor.

What about the James Dean/Jack Kerouac cool that Dar-Nimrod thought he’d find, a coolness based on rebellion and fighting "the Man?" (The researcher believes he exemplified this as a teen when he bought dark sunglasses and started smoking.) This kind of cool, which Dar-Nimrod calls "contrarian cool," still exists.  

“There is a smaller and different facet … which is the dark, historical coolness, revolving around counterculture, risky behavior, irony,” says Dar-Nimrod. “Going into the project, it is what I perceived as coolness. [It is] much less dominant.”

As for the Brooklyn-born Buscemi, a cinematic favorite of filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Jerry Bruckheimer and the Coen Brothers? Dar-Nimrod still thinks he's uncool. 

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Wondering where you stashed your wallet? A new study suggests that people hide things in a different location than where they tend to look for things.

Have you ever stashed your wallet in a safe place, only to come up short when you search for it later?

Turns out, we hide things in different locations than where we look for things. 

Eric Legge, a doctoral student in comparative psychology at the University of Alberta, and his adviser, Marcia Spetch, a professor in the psychology department, examined how adults hide and seek.

The idea came about after one of Spetch's students with a law enforcement background asked about past research on how humans hide things, in order to improve police searches. As it turns out, there were numerous studies about how people locate objects in a virtual environment but no studies about how people hide and seek in real-world settings.

For the study, Legge asked 102 participants to hide three index cards within two minutes under 70 tiles placed around a room with couches, tables, pictures, and desks. The room included a dark corner and a window. Then the subjects had another two minutes to locate cards concealed in the room.

When hiding their index cards, participants obscured them under tiles in the center of the room and immediately inside the entrance. When searching, participants looked at the darkest parts of the room, avoiding the open areas (exactly where they hid their own cards). 

“We found people didn’t search where they would hide and they didn’t hide where they would search,” Legge explained. “It was a weird disconnect where people think they are kind of smarter than the other person and would over-think where they would hide [the cards].”

The results suggest that people use different strategies to select hiding places than to search for objects hidden by others.

Participants also avoided stashing the cards near windows. Legge suspects the hiders believe a window enables others to observe their actions. Subjects were not allowed to move the cards once they were hidden, and Legge noticed that both hiders and seekers took their time, sizing up the room prior their search for cards or hiding location.

After the subjects completed the real-world task, they participated in the same test in a virtual environment. The virtual room resembled the real room, and in the virtual world participants employed the same concealment tricks.  

Understanding how people hide items could potentially aid police searches or help the military find camouflaged items like IEDs.

“We wanted to understand these biases so we could use them for training programs [for police officers]," Legge said. "If people have a bias toward hiding things in corners or near walls or something like that — and if you only have limited amount of time to search for things — you can use those heuristics to search for something off the bat.”   

The paper appears in the online journal PloS ONE.

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