When you go grocery shopping, how do you remember what to buy? Write down a list, of course. That slip of paper, or your smartphone, will do the remembering for you (it’s an external memory, as we have noted on this blog before). But what if you lose the paper or your phone’s battery dies? […]
How can the Psychonomic Society’s publications and digital content help with teaching cognitive psychology? With the “learning groups” feature! In Spring 2018 I used the featured content blog posts to make an assignment for my undergraduate cognitive psychology class at Fontbonne University, and it worked really well. This post expands on an earlier one I […]
I teach an undergraduate cognitive psychology class at Fontbonne University, and in Spring 2018 I used the Psychonomic Society’s featured content blog posts to make an assignment for my class. I’m here to tell you that it went really well! I had two main goals with this assignment: I wanted to expose students to primary […]
Video games both challenge and entertain us. We play them for fun, and the more we play the better we get. But might the skills we develop while gaming transfer to other activities? This has been an increasingly hot research question in recent years, with an industry of “brain training” games willing to race ahead of the science, as […]
In order to read this text you are focusing your attention on this single task, and you are filtering out distractions from your surroundings. People with ADHD, myself included, have difficulty doing this. A radio playing in the next room can act like an unwanted magnet to attention. But we also often struggle with distraction from […]
When do you look something up, and when do you try to remember it? One of the hallmarks of humans is our ability to store and access information in the environment around us as well as in our own central nervous systems. We have an external memory and an internal memory. Many tasks involve moment-to-moment trade-offs between the two. The “soft […]
When opposites slow you down but don’t collide: Negligible dual-task costs with stimulus incompatibility Doing two things at once is hard. But why? Answering this question can give us key insights into how the human mind works. Everyday life in the 21st century is rife with attempts to multi-task (e.g., using a mobile device while doing […]
In 2005 Amazon launched the Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk), a marketplace where requesters can pay “workers” from all over the world to complete tasks over the internet. MTurk is used to crowdsource many tasks that are still best completed by aggregate human intelligence (as opposed to machine intelligence), such as rating the relevance of search […]
As self-aware beings, we humans seem to be in a constant dance between our information storage faculties and our own assessment of those faculties—I think I remember that familiar-looking person’s name, but how sure am I? This dance guides our behavior. Sometimes we act on what we remember (“go say hi!”). Sometimes we don’t (“I’m […]