Pink is beautiful but you laugh in yellow and birthdays are blue: The colors of emotion

There is a lot more to color than most people realize. For example, color has been instrumental in experimental tests of the long-standing controversy about whether one’s language determines one’s mode of thinking. Do we all perceive colors in the same way, regardless of whether we have different words for, say, blue and green or […]

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Thinking about thinking: Practice makes imperfection detectable

Human beings think. What’s more, we also think about our own thinking—that is, we monitor, recognize, and control our own cognitive processes. This ability is known as metacognition, and it allows us to make judgments of learning or knowing, for example when we ask ourselves questions such as “What do I already know about this topic? […]

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9-1-1 in the wild: Dolphins’ distress calls and their rescuers response

There are many stories of dolphins saving people from various perilous situations including drowning and even shark attack. Until now, these events have been generally anecdotal and have been difficult to study systematically. However, the conspecific helping behaviour which may underlie these events is very interesting and has been scientifically documented on a few occassions. So-called […]

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Psychonomic Impact: Canopus or Pleiades?

The latest impact factors for the Society’s journals have just been released and are shown in the table below: The data suggest that there may be an overall increase in the impact factors of the Society’s portfolio, although the number of years shown (3 years) is too short to permit us to be confident. However, it’s clearly […]

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Training of intelligence: A question of intelligent training

Can we improve human intelligence through training? Generations of researchers have tackled this apparently simple question, and yet, after approximately a century of efforts, the malleability of intelligence remains controversial. The potential payoff is high—imagine what it would mean if we could actually train intelligence—but the road to conclusive evidence on the matter appears to […]

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So what’s this שטיק‎ about working memory? Discovering the gateway to updating

So what’s this שטיק‎ about working memory? Out of 71 posts on this site that we have published since starting out 9 months ago, 7 were about working memory or have at least mentioned it (here, here, here, here, here, and here). This is indicative of the importance of working memory to human cognition—and indeed, we have noted repeatedly that working memory explains roughly half the […]

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Need to find a needle? Make the haystack disappear by perceptual adaptation

If you have ever taken an intro class to sensation and perception, chances are that you have experienced the “waterfall illusion” as an example of motion aftereffects. You can try this yourself: Next time you stumble upon a waterfall, stare at it without moving your eyes for about a minute. When you then look at some […]

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Need to invent a light bulb? Take a nap to boost your attentional skills

Why do we sleep? Apparently, this simple question has no simple answer, despite decades of research. According to leading sleep researcher William Dement, “the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.” But just because we may not know why we need to sleep doesn’t prevent us from knowing […]

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Turning Dr. Strangelove into George W. Bush: Determinants of accentedness

There are some 40,000,000 foreign-born people living in the United States today. Most of those people hail from Asia or Latin America and the Caribbean, and their native language is therefore most likely not English. And indeed, it is not uncommon for people in the U.S.—and also the U.K., Canada, and Australia—to speak English with a […]

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