Betrayed by averaging: invalid inferences when nobody is ‘average’

One of the essential goals of psychology is generalization: describing ways in which people are similar. Of course, human behaviour varies across situations, times, and individuals, and hence often defies generalization. Ignoring this variability and assuming that people are the same can lead to improper generalizations about human behaviour. In a new paper in the Psychonomic Bulletin […]

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Catching the same fish twice: How wide is the MTurk net?

I sometimes use MTurk for running experiments. As an old-timer, there is something of a magical quality to MTurk. You post your study and only a few hours later you receive data from perhaps one thousand or so people. I can remember when we used to meet the people participating in our studies face-to-face, with […]

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When good data break bad: Data visualization and eye movements

Data is everywhere. Political campaigns, sports teams, and even music streaming sites rely on the collection and analysis of data to win, or to attain customers, and to sell targeted advertisements. Journalists use data to report the news and the public interprets data in consuming that news. Becoming data literate is no longer just a requirement of the scientist or the […]

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From #symbodiment to STEM: Debates about the nature of meaning and representations

How are the meanings of words, events and objects represented and organized in the brain? When we think of a dog, what representation are we invoking? Is there such thing as an abstract dogness—the doggiest of all dogs—or do we merely remember one of many stored exemplars of dogs that we have encountered in our lives? (If […]

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Left hit and right stay: Eye movements reveal hand value in blackjack

Eye movements offer unique insight into the functioning of the human mind. We have discussed eye movements on this blog repeatedly. For example, we have learned that while listening to music people move their eyes in a manner that is suggestive of attention being focused inward. Eye movements can also reveal whether or not people are distracted […]

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Flexible Berserkers: there’s more than one route to meaning

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know what it meant to go berserk. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know what it really meant to go berserk. I was used to examples like this (thanks, COCA!): “My God. It’s like the Richmond Botanical Gardens gone berserk. I’ve never seen plants this big.” “Annie hadn’t given him a goodbye today, […]

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The poverty of the disembodiment of embodied cognition

The #symbodiment special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review empaneling “Arguments about the nature of concepts” embodies much that is salutary about our field—vigorous, sometimes heated, criticism of recent creative attempts to ground cognition. How symbols are grounded to their worldly referents has long been recognized as a central problem for psychology by scholars such as Harnad and Skinner. The […]

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#symbodiment should be #symbodimeaning: Do we need concepts?

How are the meanings of words, events, and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. …so begins Mahon and Hickok’s introduction to this collection of papers “on issues of fundamental significance to […]

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From #symbodiment to Radical Embodied Cognition

The special issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, in conjunction with the digital #symbodiment event, represents an effort to take stock of the “embodiment vs. symbols” debate that has garnered an increasing amount of attention in the field. In this commentary, I present a few thoughts about the successes and failures of the embodied research program, and offer some thoughts on the road forward. […]

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Arguments about the nature of concepts: #symbodiment and beyond

(This post is an edited and abridged version of the opening article to the #symbodiment special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review authored by Bradford Z. Mahon and Gregory Hickok. The full article can be found here.) The question of how word, object, event and action meanings are represented and organized in the brain has […]

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