All animals need to search their environment – for food, for predators, for mates. When humans search for a specific target, the target often pops out from the background. For example, in the image below, the fish is obviously different than the people. No matter how many people were present, the fish would always be […]
Word problems – they’re the bane of many a math students’ existence. But what makes them so difficult? Sometimes, the issue is that our real-world knowledge suggests a way of thinking that is contrary to what the problem requires. For example, people assume that problems including the phrase “more than” will require addition and problems […]
As we go about our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to new information―news reports from a foreign country, politicians’ statements about domestic policy, a friend’s description of a new restaurant, and celebrity gossip. Some of that information is true and some is false. How do we remember which statements are true and which are […]
Atkinson and Shiffrin’s seminal 1968 paper is best known for outlining a possible structure for the memory system. Their concepts of sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory are still highly influential. Often forgotten, however, is that Atkinson and Shiffrin also described multiple control processes that determine how and if information moves through the memory […]