Absolutely not absolute pitch perception: but even people without perfect pitch can hear off notes

Most of us can’t tell one musical note from another – but is it because we can’t really hear the difference, or because our knowledge of musical structure is implicit? Recent evidence suggests that we can take advantage of a lifetime of experience with musical categories to identify whether a musical note sounds wrong. Being […]

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Sleeping on banara and the fate of banana: consolidation of new words in the lexicon

How do we recognize the written word? While this seems trivially easy to us, we need to remember that words that are quite close perceptually can be drastically different in meaning. Fin and fine, crew and crow, and deck and desk may look nearly the same but their meanings differ considerably. In the sentence “I […]

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Oh Deer Mice Me: Of Obsessive-Compulsive Behaviors and Marbles

Have you checked if your front door is locked? Is your stove turned off? Are you “saving” all those mailers, coupons, and magazines? How about folding those plastic sacks from the grocery store and tucking them away for another day? Have you scrubbed your counter-tops recently? All of these behaviors are considered “normal” for most […]

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Metaphors of policing: Doraville’s warriors and London’s Pride guardians

What is a tax? Is it a “burden”? Or a “civilization surcharge”? And which would you rather pay? Would you prefer to vote for someone who has a “heart of gold” or a “heart of blackness”? Is crime a “beast” that is “ravaging” cities or a “virus” that needs to be controlled? Metaphors allow us […]

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#whatWM? Playing ‘telephone’ with working memory or the War of the Ghosts 2.0

In his recent article in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that stimulated this digital event, Nelson Cowan undertakes the impressive endeavor to disentangle the various definitions of working memory (WM) that have been around in the literature since the term WM was coined. He does so to counter the confusion that the use of different […]

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#whatWM? Definitions of working memory do not need provocative claims

I was sitting in the audience, listening to a symposium speaker field questions, when someone asked about working memory. “Working memory? Does anyone actually believe in that anymore?” was the speaker’s reply, and from the inside of my narrowly-focused scientific bubble, it astonished me. I had only recently taken up my first tenure-track position as […]

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#whatWM? e pluribus unum: Consensus despite diversity

Nelson Cowan’s review of definitions of “working memory” provides a very useful overview of the different ways in which the term has been and is still being used in the literature, and the potential confusion that can be caused by its multi-faceted meaning. Cowan identified nine definitions spanning multiple disciplines and several decades of research, […]

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#whatWM? A digital event celebrating the 9 lives of working memory

Type “working memory” into Google Scholar and you get nearly 2,000,000 results. Topping the list is the paper “working memory” by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, which has been cited more than 12,000 times since its publication in 1974. The Web of Science search engine is slightly more modest, with around 54,000 scientific publications being […]

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