One of the Psychonomic Society’s journals turned 50 this year: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, more often affectionately known as AP&P, has been contributing to the scientific literature for half a century. The publisher of the journal, Springer, produced a little “happy-birthday” video: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGIyPXi40uM] The Editor’s birthday perspective To further explore this milestone, I […]
You are an intern in the premier hospital in Tierra del Fuego and you are seeing about 240 patients daily, who always suffer from one of two possible diseases (things are a little different in Tierra del Fuego), namely meowism or barkosis. The tricky thing is that the same symptoms are associated with both diseases, […]
The Google search string “how often do young men think about sex” returns around 4,000,000 hits. That number itself may point to an answer to the question. Exploring the search results further, the venerable BBC, for example, propounds a statistic that people think about sex every seven seconds, which adds up to 514 times an […]
Conversations in Milan, Rome, or Madrid seem ever so much more animated and exciting than those polite chats over a tea cozy in Oxford, London, or Wetwang (Yorkshire). At least in part, this may reflect the greater physical rigor that denizens of the Mediterranean exhibit during their speech. As the New York Times put it: […]
The Psychonomic Society launched its latest journal, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications last week. We will celebrate the new journal, under its acronym CRPI—which is pronounced “Creepee” but in a nice way—for the remainder of this week. Tomorrow we will hear from the founding editor, Jeremy Wolfe, and his thoughts about how the journal will […]
Steve Yantis was a leading researcher in attention and cognitive neuroscience who passed away two years ago. In recognition of his work for the Psychonomic Society, one of the Society’s Early Career Awards is named in his honor. And just this week, a special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics appeared in honor of the contributions […]
It gives me great pleasure to introduce our new Digital Associate Editor, Dr. Heather Hill, who joined our team a few weeks ago. Welcome, Heather, great to have you. Heather’s area of expertise is animal cognition, and her appointment therefore comes with a twinge of sad news because she is replacing Anna Wilkinson. Anna has been […]
The waiter asks whether you’d prefer potatoes or rice with your entrecote. Are you free to make that decision based on, well, free will? Or should you respond with “Look, I am a determinist. I will just wait and see what I order because I know that my order is determined”? At first glance, the […]
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major public-health problem around the world. In the United States, around 1 in a 1,000 people suffer TBI—around 1.7 million people every year—although the number can be much higher in other countries, as shown in the figure below. The impact of TBI on survivors and loved ones can be devastating. One […]
Attention guides human perception, memory, and action in intriguing ways. Some time ago on this blog we learned that visual search can be directed by conceptual information: Saying or reading a word such as “tomato” makes it easier to find red things. We also learned on this blog that looking at a tomato can help you touch […]