As consumers in the world, we are surrounded by ploys and tactics that nudge us into certain behaviors. This is especially true during the holiday shopping season. If I had a nickel for every advertisement I saw that tried to get me to buy today’s hot new deal… well, I’d probably spend all my nickels. […]
Is it likely to rain today? Do you think the Ravens will win their next game? Is now a good time to buy stock in that one tech company? We make predictions like the ones above all the time. We do this using probability estimates. What is the probability of this event happening based on […]
Color fills our world. Color makes our visual landscape exciting, vibrant, and full of character. Color also has meaning that extends far beyond color. Different cultures have associated meanings to different colors. Green, yellow, and red may be linked to traffic signals. Brown, orange, and yellow may indicate a seasonal change in nature. Universities are […]
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 […]