An old but common adage is that “context is everything”, and while this aphorism can be applied to many different topics, it has been especially significant in theories of memory. Even in early psychological research, theorists believed that having knowledge and memory for an item meant connecting it to the “context which the world provides”, […]
We owe most of our visual acuity to the fovea, the central area of the retina that is most densely packed with receptors—around 150,000 cones per square millimetre. Whenever we focus on an object, we move our eyes so ensure that the image is projected onto the fovea. And we see whatever is there, irrespective of […]
More changes are afoot among the Psychonomics digital team: I am sad to say good-bye to Joachim Vandekerckhove. I am very pleased to announce that Taylor Curley has joined our team. I am equally pleased to announce that the Society has a further vacancy for a Digital Associate Editor, to be filled effective immediately. Let’s […]
Imagine an experiment in the psychological laboratory. In the experiment, some number of participants are asked to solve problems of varying difficulty. Crucially, the participants are unique individuals and not faithful copies of one another. If that bit of fiction sounds familiar, that might be because it describes a good chunk of cognitive science and […]
Imagine living in a home for decades and then someone, perhaps an armed law enforcement officer, shows up and removes you and your belongings, often facing an uncertain future. Foreclosure of one’s home is right up there among life’s most stressful events. Not surprisingly, foreclosures have been associated with an increased incidence of major depression, […]
Clutter is a fact of life. Wherever you look, there is clutter. Even the tidiest of tidy rooms will contain much visual clutter: some objects will be in front of others, thereby partially obscuring them. So if you need to reach for the cup that’s behind the toaster, then your visual system must work through […]
We are bombarded by stimuli almost every instant of every day. Even logging off Twitter provides only temporary relief before more information arrives that we have to deal with. Being able to inhibit unwanted responses to stimuli is therefore a critically important cognitive ability, and researchers have shown considerable interest in such inhibitory and control […]
I find that the older I get, the more I “accidentally a word.” And that’s before we get to autocorrect. Sometimes, word processor errors coupled with collaborative editing on a document mean that someone types the same word in their highlighted text as occurs in the next section of the text. Or, occasionally, people will […]
The idea of enhanced or superior memory is a theme that has long fascinated cognitive researchers and society in general. It has been the theme of various novels, films, and probably an equal number of academic journal articles. The single question motivating both works of fact and fiction is, what techniques might an individual employ […]
I don’t know about you, but I remember feeling pretty smug when the large Open Science Collaboration report showing that experiments in cognitive psychology were more replicable than experiments in social psychology was published. Apologies to my social psychologist friends. Rest assured, I get my just desserts. The number of participants you need to recruit […]