Ronaldo kicking golf balls

Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid) is currently soccer’s best penalty kicker in La Liga with 35 goals in 37 penalties, which translates to a stunning 94.6% success rate. But really, how hard can it be? With a goal standing eight feet high and eight yards wide just 12 yards away from these professional soccer players, how could one […]

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Keeping track of time: Memory for duration may be capacity limited

There is physics. Then there is psychology. And never the twain shall meet? No, quite to the contrary: The nature of the relationship between the physical world and its psychological representation is among the most studied—and understood—of all mental phenomena. For more than 150 years, psychophysicists have been studying the mapping between physical quantities, such as weight […]

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“Who is the fairest in the land?” There is more to mirrors than meets the eye

“Magic mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?” Grimm and Grimm (1812) were among the first to note that mirrors do not always provide the perceiver with the desired or expected result. Two centuries later, our methodologies have become vastly more sophisticated but researchers are still fascinated by how people process information in […]

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The replicated-misinterpretation crisis

“I see a train wreck looming”—Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman did not mince words in a 2012 email to colleagues in which he drew attention to what he considered a potential replication crisis in at least some areas of psychology. Kahneman’s skepticism was fed by failed attempts to replicate classic priming studies, increasing concerns about replicability in psychology more […]

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Teddy Who? How presidents are forgotten

There will come a time when George W. Bush and Barack Obama will be remembered as poorly as Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur are today, according to Psychonomic researchers Henry Roediger and Andrew DeSoto, who have examined how rapidly well-known people are forgotten from our collective historical memories. Their work appeared in Science last week after being presented […]

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How about a few extra $ trillion? Discussing the value of open data

What’s the value of knowing the Emissions of CH4 from Enteric Fermentation in Cattle in the Caribbean in 2010? (It’s 536.8272 gigagrams, by the way.) According to McKinsey and Company, publicly available “open data”—particularly government data—can add between $3 and $5 trillion to the global economy each year. The availability of such data is said to help companies […]

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