(This post was co-authored with Rob Goldstone). Like many other scientific disciplines, psychological science has felt the impact of the big data revolution. This impact arises from the meeting of three forces: Data availability, data heterogeneity, and data analyzability. Availability. Consider that for decades, researchers have relied on the Brown Corpus of about 1 million words, […]
Finding an image among other images is a basic task—visual search—has been a staple of the vision scientist’s toolkit for decades. Even if one has no interest in visual search itself, the basic paradigm of searching for a target among an array of images is wonderfully useful for investigating memory, attention, and individual differences. In […]
This is the first in a series of posts on online data-collection. The popularity of collecting behavioral data online continues to rise. The reasons are many: ease of getting large numbers of participants, relatively low cost, and access to a more diverse population. Early concerns that online data collection is inherently unreliable are gradually evaporating, […]
Many of our beliefs are factually wrong. For example, according to the General Social Survey, roughly 20% of Americans polled in 2014 think that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Although such incorrect beliefs are a justified source of dismay to educators and scientists, they have little bearing on our everyday life. A sunset would […]
What color is Wednesday? If the answer is obvious to you, you might have a form of synesthesia in which sequences such as numbers, days of the week, and months of the year are perceived as having colors (or else you might be from Thailand). Initially, one may well be skeptical on being told that […]
One of the most hair-raising thought experiments in philosophy of mind is the philosophical zombie, a being that is physically and behaviorally identical to a normal human, but is not conscious of having any mental states, like the fellow on the right in the figure below. The existence of such a being provides […]
How are the meanings of words, events, and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. …so begins Mahon and Hickok’s introduction to this collection of papers “on issues of fundamental significance to […]
A few days ago I saw this video of Cycle Ball and thought what thousands of others thought, “how is this possible?!” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yEaZDGJt-c] The answer is, as the old joke goes, “Practice!” But practice what? I have been biking regularly for far longer than many of the players in the video and I am no closer […]
Most would agree that that taking an interdisciplinary approach to studying the mind and brain is a necessity. Yet, as practicing scientists we often find ourselves in decidedly disciplinary bubbles: reading specific journals, and relying on theoretical constructs and methods that we are most familiar with. In a new study published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, Kristin Wilson […]
What is the connection between the spelling of a word and its meaning? Does the fact that the words “lead” (the metal) and “lead” (to go in front) are spelled the same somehow make them more similar in meaning than they would be if their spelling differed? A recent paper by Peleg and colleagues published in […]