Habits can be great for you, such as flossing consistently to preserve oral health, or they can rather be a problem, such as smoking, or something I struggle with from time to time: doomscrolling. I think part of the reason I sometimes get caught in the loop of scrolling endlessly is that I actually get […]
Do you remember your prom? Do you remember your 16th birthday? Do you remember your first day of school? People usually have detailed memories of important autobiographical events. These events are usually represented in memory as being tied to a specific context and a specific moment in time. But, this specificity in recall is not […]
Have you ever noticed how movies often depict different places using distinct color palettes? Stories happening in Mexico and the Old West, for example, are frequently portrayed with sepia tones, evoking nostalgia or toughness, while movies set in cold places or warzones are often portrayed as being grayish – or technically speaking, with decreased color […]
Memories, oh memories, they can be so powerful, and detailed, and… ours. Only that, sometimes, they may not actually be ours. As we all can remember important things in our lives, and the subjective experience of remembering often tells us that our memories are coming from within, it’s easy to assume, and to feel, that […]
Have you ever seen someone who, after being wronged, seems more concerned about a way to get revenge than in stopping to think about what happened and whether revenge is even worth it? Reacting to aggressions without thinking can lead to bad consequences, ranging from relatively mild, such as a heated discussion where impoliteness escalates […]
Do you ever have trouble recognizing a familiar face? I do from time to time. But frankly, I was surprised to know that there are individuals for whom this is beyond an occasional nuisance, and it profoundly affects their social and emotional lives because of a neurological condition called prosopagnosia. I first heard of prosopagnosia […]
Online interactions and robots are increasingly common. We spend more time on video calls and we interact more and more with virtual assistants, chatbots, and avatars. We have created new verbs: it almost feels more natural to say that we are “zooming” than “having a video call”. And certain names, like “Alexa”, may bring a […]
With the return of the sunny days of summer (save for our friends in the southern hemisphere), you might find yourself in a situation where, having invited your best friends for a barbecue, you forget the sausages on the grill and serve them, er, completely charred. Seeing the blackened meat, one of them snickers: “You’re […]
Let’s get this post started with a cognitive science themed trivia question. What’s the name of the intelligence component comprising declarative and procedural knowledge learnt by an individual throughout their life span? The answer is: crystallized intelligence. Information such as the number of different words a person knows (vocabulary size) and the ability to retrieve […]
Music and language share many cognitive features. Not surprisingly, it has been argued that they may have shared evolutionary origins and are present in every culture. I have a soft spot for cognitive studies in these two areas. When reading my earlier posts, you may notice that I covered topics such as bilingualism, the acoustics of emotions in the voice, […]