Last week, I was eating dinner with some friends. One friend shared his dream, in which he was taking a high school exam and was just so nervous about thinking how he didn’t study and hence wouldn’t pass. That gave us all a good chuckle – we are all adults way beyond our high school […]
Carrying out a sequence of actions is something we do every day without thinking much about it—like when we cook. We first gather ingredients, then clean, chop, and arrange them so they are ready for cooking. Each step follows the previous one, requiring cognitive control to stay on track. But for people with mental health […]
For the last week and a half, I have traveled by plane, by car, by ferry, by kayak, by boat, and by foot, visiting many beautiful locations within the Pacific Northwest in the United States. Whether it is due to my middle-aged brain or the fact that there have just been so many places, I […]
In this All Things Cognition podcast, I interview Matt Evans and Nicolas Davidenko about their recent paper on the pitch of earworms. Let’s get right into it! Interview Transcript Lai: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. Now here’s your host, Laura Mickes. Mickes: Having a song stuck in your head is […]
“But when does lack of ‘simplicity’ in the protective belt of theoretical adjustments reach the point at which the theory must be abandoned?” – Lakatos, 1976 What does it take to falsify a psychological theory? This question sounds straightforward: if you find data that are inconsistent with the theory, you reject the theory. But in […]
We’ll start this one off with a bit of a test. Have a look at the images below – can you guess what they are? You might find a judgment like this a bit difficult, and tasks like this reveal that visual perception is much more than simply registering an image. To do this accurately, […]
As a young French master’s student who was not very comfortable with English, reading Larry’s seminal 1999 paper was quite a challenge. It was neither the shortest nor the easiest paper to digest, yet it profoundly influenced my academic journey. This work was decisive in choosing the direction of my master’s thesis, and it shaped […]
A harsh review can sometimes feel like a wrecking ball to one’s work, and, as academic lore has it, it’s often ‘Reviewer 2’ who wields the ball. However, a critical review I received in the late 1990s became a turning point in my research, thanks to Larry Barsalou’s (1999) groundbreaking article on perceptual symbol systems. […]
Writing tributes isn’t my strongest suit, but when it comes to Larry, I’ll just tell it like it is (and no, this isn’t an endorsement of Donald Trump). I’ve spent most of my academic career immersed in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science. My primary focus has always been on what some might consider the more mundane […]
During my postdoctoral years, I decided to attend a small, niche conference to delve deeper into a specific area of neuroscience. I didn’t know anyone, so I was grateful to meet another postdoc who also found themself on the fringe. As we bonded, he shared a saying that has stuck with me: “there are people […]