One butterfly for you and two for me

Prosocial behaviors are behaviors that advantage others and include helping, cooperating, volunteering, comforting, and sharing. The bird pictured below sharing his catch with his friend or mate is an example of a prosocial behavior. In humans, prosocial behaviors tend to be directed more toward people we like than those we do not like. In the […]

Continue Reading

First-case scenario: Primacy effects depend on reading direction

How many U.S. presidents can you name? (Apologies to our international audience.) Regardless of how many you can recall, I would bet that among the ones you did remember are Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Trump, Obama, and Bush. I would also bet that among the ones you did not remember are McKinley, Hoover, and Cleveland. Don’t […]

Continue Reading

#psynom18: The digital frontier

The Psychonomic Society has been actively upgrading its digital presence—not just here, on the Featured Content site, but also during our annual meetings. We have been tweeting with our own hashtag for several years, and this year we are taking several extra steps. Live tweeting The hashtag for this year’s meeting is #psynom18. Everybody is […]

Continue Reading

Countdown to #psynom18: Academic highlights

The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society will commence a week from today. The Society is looking forward to welcoming you to New Orleans. The program has been posted and the mobile app is available for download. The Society is urging everyone who is planning to attend to register online rather than onsite. (My best guess is that you have […]

Continue Reading

Thomas the loop engine: Learning to program computers with a toy train

With the increased demand for computer programming skills in industries outside of technology, younger and younger kids are now taught the basics of computer science to prepare for future jobs. For example, when Amazon launched a program aiming to teach 10 million kids a year to code last week, it was because the company was […]

Continue Reading

Ichabod Crane and perceptual categorization in pigeons

Suppose I were to show you three different objects – a Jeep, Honda, and Ferrari. You could quickly name their shared category as “car”. Pigeons, honeybees, dogs, rats, and a variety of primates can answer that question just as fast as a human, after sufficient experience. Even more impressive is that all of these species can […]

Continue Reading

12,000 words and no plot but still useful: Introducing our new Resources for Research section

The main purpose of this blog is to showcase current research that has appeared in the journals of the Psychonomic Society. Anyone who publishes in a Psychonomic Society journal is invited, in the acceptance letter, to contact the Digital Content Editor to nominate their article for a blogpost. This is the principal process by which […]

Continue Reading

Resetting of visual working memory: the tabula rasa of a separation

Visual working memory (VWM) refers to our ability to hold in memory, for relatively brief amounts of time, an array of arbitrary shapes or colors that are not easily verbalized. For example, consider the stimulus below: When this is shown for 1/10th of a second, and is then replaced by a blank screen or some […]

Continue Reading