If you witness a crime, you may be asked to try to pick the perpetrator out of a police lineup. If you are unfamiliar with this line of research or have never been an eyewitness, your notion of a lineup may have come from movies and tv, and may be something like this: (Warning: watching […]
Recently, an error was found in this paper. The updated paper is here. —– Do you like talking on the phone to strangers? No? Well, neither do I. And for good reason – talking to someone you do not know over noisy speakers that lose part of the sound spectrum can be challenging, especially if […]
How can the Psychonomic Society’s publications and digital content help with teaching cognitive psychology? With the “learning groups” feature! In Spring 2018 I used the featured content blog posts to make an assignment for my undergraduate cognitive psychology class at Fontbonne University, and it worked really well. This post expands on an earlier one I […]
We experience potentially emotive stimuli all the time. Some of us suffer intense outrage when we mistakenly tune into Fox News. Others have the same experience when they stumble upon CNN. We all have developed strategies to cope with those events, a skill known as emotion regulation. Although emotions are often portrayed as “irresistible forces”—there […]
Apparently the internet, video games, and social media are damaging our children’s development, and are responsible for the increase in autism over the last few decades—or so it has been claimed, although that claim hasn’t withstood scrutiny. Similarly, Wikipedia has an entry for something known as Internet addiction disorder, which apparently occurs when internet use […]
People are capable of inferring many attributes of an object by wielding it. Pick up a hammer and you can get a fairly good idea of its length, width, and shape (an ability that is known as exteroception). You will also acquire information about the orientation of the hammer in your hand (exproprioception), and your […]
Remember answering machines? Me neither, but this is why Seinfeld exists. When Jerry’s girlfriend, Sophie, leaves a message without stating her name (just, “it’s me!”), Jerry decides to call her back without stating his own name. Stripped of visual and contextual cues—Jerry’s face, what he’s wearing, his name—Sophie fails to identify him by just his […]
Imagine settling into the well-deserved holiday on the Ningaloo Reef. The Indian Ocean is warm and gentle and you go for your first exploratory snorkel. The corals are beginning to recover from their latest bleach and the number and coloring of the tropical fish is as enchanting as it is astounding. And then you take […]