Opening the door to distraction: The open office effect

Better get those headphones: We can’t really ignore task-related noise Like many people, I work in an open office. Workers increasingly find themselves in open offices as companies (and universities) switch to these layouts in a bid to maximize space and reduce building costs. In my case, I work remotely but share a local co-working […]

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#goCRPI: Bayes battling baserate neglect in medical diagnosis

You are an intern in the premier hospital in Tierra del Fuego and you are seeing about 240 patients daily, who always suffer from one of two possible diseases (things are a little different in Tierra del Fuego), namely meowism or barkosis. The tricky thing is that the same symptoms are associated with both diseases, […]

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#goCRPI What it means to be a man: Just because you find her pretty doesn’t mean she’s interested

The Google search string “how often do young men think about sex” returns around 4,000,000 hits. That number itself may point to an answer to the question. Exploring the search results further, the venerable BBC, for example, propounds a statistic that people think about sex every seven seconds, which adds up to 514 times an […]

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When hand waving turn pistons into engines: The role of gestures in creating understanding

Conversations in Milan, Rome, or Madrid seem ever so much more animated and exciting than those polite chats over a tea cozy in Oxford, London, or Wetwang (Yorkshire). At least in part, this may reflect the greater physical rigor that denizens of the Mediterranean exhibit during their speech. As the New York Times put it: […]

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#goCRPI: A note from the Editor in Chief

(Editor in Chief: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications) Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI) is a new journal with ambitions. Not only do we want to publish first-rate cognitive research, we want to change the standard way that our discipline thinks about basic and applied research. The standard view is dichotomous: Is your research basic, […]

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Seeing the unseen from hands to minds: #goCRPI

The Psychonomic Society launched its latest journal, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications last week. We will celebrate the new journal, under its acronym CRPI—which is pronounced “Creepee” but in a nice way—for the remainder of this week. Tomorrow we will hear from the founding editor, Jeremy Wolfe, and his thoughts about how the journal will […]

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Zombie apocalypse? Or Zombie bigger bang for the cue?

One of the most hair-raising thought experiments in philosophy of mind is the philosophical zombie, a being that is physically and behaviorally identical to a normal human, but is not conscious of having any mental states, like the fellow on the right in the figure below.     The existence of such a being provides […]

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She’ll eat the red … ladybug: Exploiting constraints during language processing

For a long period of time in language research, people made the assumption that language processing and other aspects of cognition were distinct from each other. For example, most people have the impression that talking while driving is easy, even though talking on the phone can make driving more dangerous. In addition to the idea […]

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Mechanisms of Attentional Control: A Special Issue in Honor of the Contributions of Steven Yantis

Steve Yantis was a leading researcher in attention and cognitive neuroscience who passed away two years ago. In recognition of his work for the Psychonomic Society, one of the Society’s Early Career Awards is named in his honor. And just this week, a special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics appeared in honor of the contributions […]

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