We rarely listen to just one stream of information at a time. Whether we are at a dinner party, on a crowded bus, or talking on the phone while walking down a busy street, more often than not there are multiple voices that compete for our attention. People are generally very good at focusing on […]
Do you have a friend who’s surprisingly good at recognizing songs? Someone whose ear for melodies is uncanny? Who at concerts cringes if one of the musicians is playing slightly out of tune? What if that person had an even more uncanny ability—that they could tell you, hearing only a single note, that the note […]
Certain songs have a way of getting into your head and staying there for a while. We’ve covered the cognitive side of earworms before. These songs that haunt us tend to have a recognizable tempo or beat—usually one that we can move to. Lady Gaga has given us a number of earworms, including Poker Face, […]
One of the Psychonomic Society’s journals, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, offers a class of articles known as “tutorial reviews”. The tutorial review mechanism is intended to serve as a high-level introductory review of relatively broad topics that fall within the domain of the journal. Tutorial reviews may be an attractive mechanism for authors looking to […]
As we go about our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to new information―news reports from a foreign country, politicians’ statements about domestic policy, a friend’s description of a new restaurant, and celebrity gossip. Some of that information is true and some is false. How do we remember which statements are true and which are […]
#psynom19 concluded more than a week ago, and we have already provided a snapshot of the next generation of Psychonomes. Now it is time for a brief report on some other aspects of the annual meeting, in particular an analysis of our social media presence and in particular the services rendered by our volunteers who […]
Will computers ever think like us? And if they do, how would we know? In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that computers could be considered intelligent if an observer can no longer distinguish which of two partners in a conversation is a “real” human and which is a computer. To date, no computer has passed this […]
The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Montreal drew to a close last Sunday. Following tradition (anything that lasts more than 4 years surely qualifies as a tradition?), I e-interviewed a few mainly junior researchers who were presenting posters at the meeting. I hope this gives us a better sense of what the next […]
Bonjour-hi fellow Psychonomic Society Fellows and Members! Over 2,400 cognitive psychologists from around the world will descend on the city of Montréal for the Psychonomic Society 60thAnnual Meeting the week commencing November 11th, 2019. Keynote Around 60% of the citizens of Montreal and surrounding areas are bilingual in English and French. What a fitting venue for […]
As researchers begin to focus more and more on the factors that support replicability and replication in cognitive psychology, they are increasingly turning toward online venues for data collection. Many experiments are still run in the lab with participants recruited from convenience samples because this gives researchers more control over their participants’ behavior, and often […]