Video games have gotten a bad rap. When googling “do video games”, the first results Google suggests are “rot your brain”, “make you dumber”, and then finally “make you smarter.” As far as the last option is concerned, evidence seems to be accumulating that shows that gaming does enhance visual processing and cognitive control skills. […]
Signing a Swedish sound beats catching a ball: linguistic processing in sign language and working memory performance Imagine that you are discussing a familiar topic with a friend in a quiet room. If you are a neurotypical individual, understanding them and knowing what to say next may seem effortless. Now imagine that you are having […]
What if your dad told you that you were capable of time travel? Well, what day goes by when we don’t imagine landing our dream job or snagging that grant? How many days go by that we don’t look fondly on that time we pretended to be incredibly sick and took our best friend’s car to […]
Did you find this link from Twitter, or from your email? And if you found this link on Twitter, are you returning to it periodically in case you feel like quipping about the content? Do you text others pictures of cats while you read those same articles? We are constantly dealing with attention capture (potentially from […]
Human beings are not perfect and our cognitive flaws are legendary—for example, we are not aware of how dangerous our distracted driving is and tend to think that it is others who are bad drivers. People can, however, hold an immense amount of information in mind and use this to navigate space more efficiently and accurately than […]
Nearly every psychologist has experienced the results of an experiment coming up inconclusive, where the statistics couldn’t tell us one way or the other whether our manipulation had worked. These experiments often go straight into the file drawer, to languish forever amongst years-old consent forms. Our distaste for such null results is due in part to […]
Trouble finding the red pen? Just say “tomato.” High-level conceptual information can direct our attention during visual search. Wouldn’t it be handy if saying “metallic” made your keys pop out when you were looking for them? Or if saying “green” helped you find your beer on St. Patrick’s Day? Language is used to orient our […]
When we read stories, we are transported into magical worlds. That magical world may be another person’s life, a point in the distant past, or it may be a world full of magic and wizardry. One of the most remarkable things we do when we read is to imagine things we cannot ever see or […]
Why do our hearts ache, and why do we get butterflies in our stomachs? Why is a word or phrase always on the tip of your tongue? Words that convey strong emotions often involve bodily organs (e.g. my heart aches, I have butterflies in my stomach), and we speak of kind people as being warm. […]
In an increasingly globalized world, one of the most important things we have to do is understand people from different parts of the world and the things they say. Not only are there an estimated 5,000 different languages on Earth today, but also the number of non-native speakers of English vastly outnumbers the number of […]