One week till #psGranada16

The International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society 2016 in Granada, Spain, will commence a week from today. The scientific program is available here and promises a varied and exciting meeting. The lineup of keynote speakers is particularly notable: Judith Kroll will be giving the opening keynote on Thursday (5th May) on Two languages in mind: Bilingualism as a lens to cognition. […]

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When today’s grass is greener than tomorrow’s gold

When today’s grass is greener than tomorrow’s gold: Modeling temporal discounting We value the present more than the future. When given the choice, very few people would prefer to wait a month to receive $51 if the alternative were to receive $50 today, even though the accrual during this delay would correspond to a whopping […]

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When you chuang to close the chuang because you want to go to chuang

When you chuang to close the chuang because you want to go to chuang: Modeling spoken word recognition in Chinese We noted earlier this week that Chinese is a language without inflection of verbs or nouns. That is, whereas in English you “walk” and Fred “walks”, in Chinese the same word would be used irrespective of who […]

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Singularities in inflection: Linguistic goslings or resource limitations?

Human beings today communicate in 7,000 different languages. Although many languages are expected to go extinct in the future because there are not enough people left who keep them alive, the ability to speak more than one language will continue to be in high demand. In fact, by some estimates, more of us are bilingual (i.e., speak two languages, […]

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Mistaking a murderer – Eyewitness memory blindness

Think about many of the decisions you make. Often, people can articulate reasons why they made a particular choice. Why are you voting for that presidential candidate? Why did you order chicken instead of fish? Why do you like soccer better than football? Not only could you describe why you made each of these decisions, […]

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An Outlook on the Field

New developments appear rapidly in unpredictable places. How can we stay up to date on these advances? In an earlier era, we subscribed to a small number of journals and read the tables of contents of a few more. This strategy covered most major developments in one’s field. Those days are over. Increasingly, groundbreaking new […]

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Lighting up the inner GPS

The Editor of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Learning & Behavior , Jonathon Crystal, has launched a new section of the journal that is intended to provide an outlook on the field and a venue for discussion of the most exciting current research in learning and behavior. Jonathon blogged about this new initiative here. So what are those outlook […]

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Simian memory has no time for decay

A variety of things can influence memory, and we frequently find that existing knowledge can impact the learning of new information. For example, some people (including me) find it hard to learn to drive an automatic car because of their pre-existing knowledge of driving a stick shift (standard) car. For example, early during the transition, […]

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Keeping your mind on the cycle ball: Region of proximal learning and mind wandering

A few days ago I saw this video of Cycle Ball and thought what thousands of others thought, “how is this possible?!” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yEaZDGJt-c] The answer is, as the old joke goes, “Practice!” But practice what? I have been biking regularly for far longer than many of the players in the video and I am no closer […]

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