So long (for now): Thinking back on our digital journey

When we launched the Psychonomic Society’s featured content site back in 2014, we had a simple idea: take the remarkable work of cognitive scientists and make it approachable, inviting a broader community into the conversation. Over the years, we did just that. Through blog posts (over 800!), podcasts (6 seasons!), interviews, research highlights, and digital […]

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Sharing, caring, and developing better practices for both

One of the greatest (and, in my opinion, most overlooked) aspects of science is that it is a process inherently founded on and driven by community. Almost all ongoing research questions are derived from prior research, and the outputs of ongoing research will inevitably inspire new lines of work and discovery. Scientific discoveries are ultimately […]

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Bored of your short-term memory assessment? Build a sandwich

There’s a mean (not really) but funny (maybe only to me) trick I like to play on my students that starts with a lesson on an experiment. It works for almost any kind of cognitive psychology study, and I start it by walking my students through the design of an experiment—the research question, important variables, […]

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Right meaning “same” differs from right meaning “different”; What’s left?

There are some who might scoff at it, but I’m always a bit charmed to meet someone who puts their fingers and thumbs in the classic “L” and “reversed L” formations to differentiate between left and right. And although I usually don’t need to do this, it seems to be a relatable enough experience to at […]

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Gaze cues are the window to incidental learning about the world

I had never given much thought to the saying that “the eyes are the window to the soul” until I watched the TV show, Fleabag. Without giving too much away (although, honestly, this paragraph will probably be a major spoiler), the show follows a woman who regularly breaks the fourth wall, where she looks away […]

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Benefits of being bilingual? Not adaptive control

Much to the chagrin of my Vietnamese parents, and probably also a few French teachers from my school years, I never picked up a language beyond English well enough to comfortably call myself bilingual. I think the closest thing to a bilingual experience I’ve ever had was when I attempted to order in French at […]

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Now you don’t see me, and now you still don’t see me: Detecting movie skips using a flicker paradigm

In the past I’ve been accused of various forms of laziness—not taking advantage of a beautiful day, whiling away my childhood, not studying for my next test, whiling away my adolescence, not writing my dissertation, whiling away my 20s, 30s, etc.—when really I’ve been hard at work watching TV and movies. That the optimal method […]

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What could possibly have caused this? Investigating the difficulty of causal learning

I have a fairly straightforward relationship with dairy: I partake in its delicious fruits semi-regularly and it, in turn, completely devastates my guts. Yet despite this connection between lactose consumption and gastrointestinal distress—a correlation that I can only describe as very strong—it somehow took me several years to fully realize that, yes, I’m lactose intolerant. […]

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Graphic design is my passion, but it doesn’t inspire unconscious processing

Unfortunately for me, one of the first things I see most mornings is an ad. It’s largely my fault—I have the extremely terrible habit of keeping my phone next to me at night and then an arguably worse habit of checking Twitter (excuse me, X) in the morning, leading me to inevitably scroll past an […]

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