Do you have a friend who’s surprisingly good at recognizing songs? Someone whose ear for melodies is uncanny? Who at concerts cringes if one of the musicians is playing slightly out of tune? What if that person had an even more uncanny ability—that they could tell you, hearing only a single note, that the note […]
As researchers begin to focus more and more on the factors that support replicability and replication in cognitive psychology, they are increasingly turning toward online venues for data collection. Many experiments are still run in the lab with participants recruited from convenience samples because this gives researchers more control over their participants’ behavior, and often […]
I find that the older I get, the more I “accidentally a word.” And that’s before we get to autocorrect. Sometimes, word processor errors coupled with collaborative editing on a document mean that someone types the same word in their highlighted text as occurs in the next section of the text. Or, occasionally, people will […]
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 […]
Sarcasm, a type of irony, is inescapably embedded in the internet today, with ironic language of some kind being ubiquitous on Facebook, Twitter, in blogs, in news articles, and more. Computers, unlike people, often fail to detect sarcasm, which has the notable quality of often meaning nearly the opposite of what was written. For example, […]
It is rare that we can do two things at once—if someone asks you to rub your stomach and pat your head, odds are that you’ll rub your head. A better strategy for a lot of different cognitive tasks is to switch between them. Switching typically comes at a cost, however. Switching can even negatively […]
In some parts of New York state, it recently snowed 18 inches (~45 centimeters) following a major winter storm. With every hour, the snow piled higher and higher – but some of the increments in accumulation, especially toward the beginning, felt bigger, while others took longer to notice. You might even have the feeling that […]
Language and music unfold in time in similar ways. Just like we do not produce an arbitrary sequence of words, music follows a set of principles, and notes that fail to follow them can sound “ungrammatical.” Both language and music also often show hierarchical structure, with the pace of speech and music often having what […]
The spelling rules of English are by far the most challenging aspect of learning to read, of reading, and of writing. Anyone who has seen a child’s spontaneous writing has seen all kinds of creative misspellings. Adults, of course, are also not immune to spelling errors. Spelling is so strange in the English language that […]
Recently, an error was found in this paper. The updated paper is here. —– Do you like talking on the phone to strangers? No? Well, neither do I. And for good reason – talking to someone you do not know over noisy speakers that lose part of the sound spectrum can be challenging, especially if […]