Picking someone out of a lineup can be tough. Bias in eyewitness testimony is a complicated factor that can influence judicial proceedings. When eyewitnesses identify a criminal, they need to recognize a person’s face, and they need to place them at the scene of the crime. That’s a difficult task for most passersby. We might […]
Have you ever visited a foreign country or region and found your own speech being influenced by the accent of the native people? Or perhaps you live far from home, and when you go back, your speech shifts back to the local accent? This happens to me every time I visit my family in Baltimore, […]
The “same or different” concept is something we all learned as a child. We were shown two images and asked if they were the same or different. This activity teaches us to compare objects in the world; it introduces critical thinking and has applications in mathematics. The same/different task has also been used in visual […]
Have you ever noticed that restaurants often advertise their food with vibrant, bright colors—highlighting every juicy morsel of the meal? The reasoning is simple: colorful photography makes the food more appetizing and makes us (the viewer) more likely to buy it. Some believe that this type of advertising even contributes to overeating habits when marketing […]
Ah, the power of swear words. Whether you curse like a sailor or never use foul language, we all know a swear word when we hear it. They have a special ability to convey one’s emotion with particular emphasis—whether grief, pain, anger, fear, desire, joy, or surprise. Sometimes, the most reasonable emotional reaction is a […]
“The impious warbler delved into the paltry aperitif and anointed the pumice with ineffable rigmarole.” That’s a sentence with a lot of big words (and I hope it’s never been uttered before), but if you understood that I was referring to a nasty little bird that wiped some booze on a rock, then you may […]
“We all sometimes feel that we make different decisions when we’re hungry. We can now be more specific about this, by distinguishing planned vs. habitual actions.” – Sanjay Manohar Hunger is a beast. It can make us act unlike ourselves at times. As every Snickers ad reminds us: you’re not you when you’re hungry. We […]
When I was a kid, I had a pair of sunglasses that had little mirrors on the side of the lenses that allowed you to see what was happening behind you. I would walk around my neighborhood feeling so cool, like a bona fide Spy Kid. James Bond had nothing on me. I thought someday […]
The night before a big exam, college students may attempt to “study” by listening to their recorded notes while they fall asleep. They may feel that processing the information before sleep will help them remember it better the next day. A number of studies have shown this to be effective, even though it didn’t help […]
Imagine learning how to read and play music for the first time. It starts with a series of dots and lines thrown around on a piece of paper. Soon you learn how to interpret these so-called notes. You assign a letter name to each note, and then you figure out how to produce that note […]