Setting the stage: a packed room in the Austria Center Vienna, venue of the International Convention of Psychological Science from 23-25 March 2017. Six speakers from various research areas, some in the audience already tweeting about the session before it even started. The session focused on the use of Social Media to Promote Professional Development, […]
Our perception of the world is flexible and depends on our expectations, our experience, and on cues around us. Ambiguous images, whose identity can change depending on our interpretation, offer a striking illustration of this flexibility. Perhaps the best-known and best-studied ambiguous image is the rabbit-duck, first brought to psychologists’ attention by Jastrow in 1899. […]
And the winner is….. in 2014, cognitive scientists from University College London launched an international competition, with a $10,000 prize, to find the best way of tackling a challenge faced by millions every day, namely how best to acquire the vocabulary of a new language. Prof David Shanks and Dr Rosalind Potts from UCL teamed […]
We need to talk about Kevin has been described as masterful. But the film (or book) will probably leave you horrified. And perhaps you will be wondering about psychopathy afterwards. Psychopathy is characterized by “persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits”, according to Wikipedia. People with psychopathy make up 25% […]
Imagine standing in an isle of cereals and you want to find THE cereal that has been advertised to you as exceptionally yummy and at the same time, exceptionally healthy—and all that for a great price! What will influence your decision regarding what cereal box you’ll eventually place into your cart, and how could companies […]
Yogi Berra once famously said that “You can observe a lot by watching”. Yogi Berra observed and said a lot of things, but this line has a lot going for it. The idea that information can be gathered by “just looking” entered statistics many decades ago. For example, John Tukey, one of the 20th century’s […]
Music is powerful. It can make our attention turn away from external stimuli and redirect it to our inner thoughts. Sometimes we become so inward-focused after we bring a piece of music to mind, that this “earworm” stays with us long past the point where we’d rather forget that tune. In addition, one of the […]
How long is a piece of string? This proverbial question is not really intended to have an answer. But what about asking which of two strings is longer? That question is well-defined and has a clear answer. In the laboratory we probably would not use strings but we might present lines next to each other […]
“Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.” —William Penn There are many dimensions of human behavior. Consider a typical recognition memory task in which a participant is given a list of words to remember. A little while later, suppose this participant is shown the word “bear” and asked whether it […]
We keep track of multiple objects every day. When we drive, we need to keep track of the cyclist near the curb, the dump truck bearing down on us from behind, and the lost tourist in front of us who is signaling turns at random. When we are on the beach on a family outing, […]