HARRIS: Well, there was a failure of—of states to—to integrate— BIDEN: —No, but— HARRIS: —Public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate, Berkeley, California Public Schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education. BIDEN: Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision. HARRIS: So, […]
(This post was co-authored by Thomas L. Griffiths). Since Wilhelm Wundt established the first university psychology laboratory over 100 years ago, relatively little has changed in how we gather data in psychological science. Technology and statistical methods have evolved, but experiments are still run primarily by individual brick-and-mortar laboratories, test specific hypotheses, and rely on […]
(This post was co-authored with Rob Goldstone). Like many other scientific disciplines, psychological science has felt the impact of the big data revolution. This impact arises from the meeting of three forces: Data availability, data heterogeneity, and data analyzability. Availability. Consider that for decades, researchers have relied on the Brown Corpus of about 1 million words, […]
The goal of cognitive science is to understand how the mind works. It is a peculiar aspect of this quest that cognitive science often seems to be as much about computers and software as it is about the human mind: There is an intriguing parallelism between developments in computer science and affiliated fields on the […]
It is truly remarkable what the mind can achieve through the process of reading. Take for example the message below. Were you able to interpret what this message says? Our ability to ‘read’ this combination of numbers and letters highlights the fact that reading (among other things) has become a deeply embedded feature of our […]
People often do multiple things at the same time. We can talk on the phone while stacking the dishwasher, and some university students seemingly know how to type messages on their cell phones while listening to a lecture. There are many occasions, however, when such multi-tasking breaks down or becomes dangerous. For example, notwithstanding how […]
Beloved childhood friends for many – A. A. Milne’s characters from the Hundred Acre Woods also presented models for various psychological disorders – anxiety (Piglet), obsessive-compulsive disorder (Rabbit), depression (Eeyore), ADHD (Tigger). In fact, there is a full body of scientific research examining the various disorders represented by each character, such as a study conducted […]
In his seminal work of science fiction, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams ponders a question, which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be difficult to answer: What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? In the novel, a super-intelligent civilization builds a super-computer to answer the question. That super-computer cannot answer the […]
Finding your office key amidst your building key, the lab key, your house key, the other house key in case you need to cat-sit for a friend is like finding a needle in a haystack. People who have tons of keys develop elaborate organizational systems, clumping together keys for similar places―like the Psychology building―which can […]
What are little boys made of Snips & snails & puppy dogs tails And such are little boys made of. What are little girls made of Sugar & spice & all things nice This very popular rhyme, probably written by English author Robert Southey, has persisted in western culture for nearly two centuries. It embodies […]