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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Signing a Swedish sound beats catching a ball: linguistic processing in sign language and working memory performance Imagine that you are discussing a familiar topic with a friend in a quiet room. If you are a neurotypical individual, understanding them and knowing what to say next may seem effortless. Now imagine that you are having […]
When you were a famous rock star: reading emotional facial expression during autobiographical recall
We all remember what it was like to be young, when we were rock stars, Blues singers, invincible volleyball players, or marathon runners. We may also remember that specific marathon on a Tuesday in November where some particularly clever person put a billboard next to the finish line that said “turning back now would be […]
We often think about conceptual thought as being uniquely human, however, there is growing evidence to suggest that animals can learn concepts as well. The use of concepts requires understanding the relationship between stimuli. So, if I presented these three faces to you and asked you who was familiar, my guess if that you’d choose […]
Eating dinner without checking your email: impulse control, time preference, and mobile device usage
How well would you do in the phone stacking game? In case you have not heard of it, it’s played during a dinner out and it goes as follows: at the beginning of the meal everyone puts their phone on a pile in the middle of the table. Like this: And then you start ordering drinks […]
When we teach our first-year Psychology students about the “history of Psychology”, they usually get to see at least one slide that shows a “black box”. “This black box” – we tend to say – “is what Behaviorists like Watson and Skinner wanted to keep unopened, since all they were interested in was the relationship […]