Imagine you have a 4-year-old about to participate in the marshmallow test, a measure of their ability to delay gratification. In front of them is a treat, and they have the option to take the immediate, smaller reward (e.g., one marshmallow) or receive a delayed, larger reward (e.g., two marshmallows) by waiting until an experimenter […]
How well do you remember detailed visual information, such as the precise color or shape of an object you saw several hours ago? Although intuition might suggest that our memory for fine details is quite poor, research finds that visual long-term memory has a massive capacity for visual details of objects and scenes. For instance, after […]
As you try to make sense of this sentence, do you find yourself looking at individual letters, or processing each word automatically? If you are an expert English reader, you probably said the latter. Evidence suggests that at least some word recognition occurs due to holistic processing, or perceptually integrating letters into a unitary whole. […]
Whenever I visit a new city, one of my favorite things to do is go to the local natural history museum. I love seeing every color of the rainbow expressed in our earth’s gems and minerals, walking among the models of whale and dinosaur skeletons, and feeling humbled by the vastness of our universe. As […]
Which steak would you prefer: one that is 25% fat, or one that is 75% lean? If you’re like the participants in a classic study by Irwin Levin, you’d pick the latter. This finding represents a framing effect, where equivalent information presented in different ways influences behavior. In this example, the steak labeled with a […]
Does Stanley Hudson, from The Office (US), sport a moustache? In an opener from the now-classic NBC sitcom, The Office (US), Dunder Mifflin staff members debate over whether their colleague has a moustache. The episode starts with the announcement that Stanley Hudson, a Black employee, is returning from his recent tonsillectomy, and his colleagues get […]
Older adults are more motivated than younger adults to do well in lab studies. What does this mean for our understanding of cognitive aging? If you’re a psychologist who studies cognitive aging, chances are you recruit younger adults (18-22 years) from the college or university and older adults (65+ years) from the community and have […]
We all enjoy a tasty snack every now and then, and we usually have personal preferences for specific foods. Some of us may prefer chocolate, whereas others prefer potato chips. Sometimes we may get a little carried away snacking, ending up eating way more than we intended. So, what happens in the brain when we […]
If you’re an educator, you’ve probably wondered how many of your students are paying attention as you deliver course content in class. Although most research on mind wandering has been conducted in the laboratory, understanding when and why students mind wander during class can have important implications for how we teach and design our learning […]
Imagine your morning routine: First, you’re about to take a shower. You turn on the water and wait for it to heat up while you undress. Although you’ve never kept track, you know exactly when to step into the shower to avoid a shock from the cold water. Now imagine you’re making some coffee. You […]