Here’s a disconcerting thought: what if the baggage screener at the airport – not that many of us are spending much time in airports these days – got paid a bonus for confidently flagging bags for additional inspection? In an ideal world, they would just assess bags based on the perceptual information they have from […]
Once upon a time, Kepler and Descartes proposed that vergence is the critical absolute distance cue. And that theory lived happily ever after. Until Paul Linton‘s paper. In this podcast, I interview Paul (pictured below) about his work published in the Psychonomic Society journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. Learn about longstanding theories and Linton’s research […]
Imagine for a moment, the wind blowing through your hair, your skin glistening with the slightest sheen of moisture, a steady breath in and out, and your feet softly caressing the pavement as you place one foot in front of the other with the grace of a cheetah while the moon shines down. Unfortunately, my […]
What’s scarier? Big bad wolf or bad big wolf? The three little pigs and little red riding hood and her grandma probably wouldn’t be bothered with the distinction. But there’s a natural order to language in which “bad big wolf” doesn’t sound quite right. The English language has various grammatical rules that speakers follow to […]
Imagine how you might measure someone’s spatial thinking skills – their ability to understand, manipulate, and reason about how objects interact in physical spaces. If you’re a psychologist, you probably immediately thought of Shepard and Metzler’s mental rotation task. In this task, participants are shown two illustrations and asked if the pictured objects are identical or […]
Professor Irene Pepperberg (pictured below) is the awardee of the Comparative Cognition Society‘s Annual Research Award for 2020 for her body of work. With that, it is a Special Issue in Learning & Behavior in honor of her research contributions. In the interview, she reflects on her career, gives her 20-year self some advice, talks about research with African Grey […]