How do we build true novelty? We have new experiences all the time (maybe reading a blog post about a scientific article is one, and if it is, welcome!), but studying how we learn about new items and new categories poses significant challenges. I mean, we could spend a lot of time trying to learn […]
Have you ever had the experience of talking with someone and partway through, you realize that while you both might be using the same vocabulary, what you mean is quite different? Sometimes, this comes from a generational gap. Slang words change frequently, and some words don’t have the same meaning that they once did. For […]
How am I supposed to learn my way around this confusing new place? Picture the following situation: you’re on vacation, you’ve spent all day (and then some) in airports and on planes, and you’ve finally made it to your hotel. Now you’ve got to find your room, and you need to remember how to get […]
Is this the right assessment for you? Is it right for me? Imagine you’re back in school (it may have been a while for you!) and you’re undergoing some kind of psychometric assessment, perhaps to see if you need extra support to be the best student you can be. If you’re reading this, it’s probably […]
While you might not think of it, your life and your experience of moving through the world is governed by innumerable sets of rules that you’ve learned. We tend not to think much about these rules or grammars, much less how we learn them, but they’re nearly as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Imagine […]
When was the last time you looked for a T among Ls? Unless you spend a lot of time in the lab, running in visual search experiments, your experience of visual search probably isn’t looking for Ts amongst Ls. Your experience of visual search in day to day life is probably more like “where’s my […]
What does being in nature actually do for us? In the last couple of years, when we’ve all been in lockdown and had to work from home for prolonged periods, we’ve each probably thought “I should get out of the house and get some fresh air” – but does that help in more than the […]
Should you have to be a data archeologist with open data? Have you ever come back to a dataset a few years after collecting it, and scratched your head over what Past You was thinking and what the variables and labels mean? Now, imagine it’s not Past You, but another researcher, and you are trying […]
How might a road tell you what to expect, and would this keep everyone who uses it safer? Since it’s probably a bad idea to have the road start to talk to drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, how should we design it so that everyone who uses it can do so safely? This question has interested […]
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 […]