Human beings today communicate in 7,000 different languages. Although many languages are expected to go extinct in the future because there are not enough people left who keep them alive, the ability to speak more than one language will continue to be in high demand. In fact, by some estimates, more of us are bilingual (i.e., speak two languages, […]
The Editor of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Learning & Behavior , Jonathon Crystal, has launched a new section of the journal that is intended to provide an outlook on the field and a venue for discussion of the most exciting current research in learning and behavior. Jonathon blogged about this new initiative here. So what are those outlook […]
When you were a famous rock star: reading emotional facial expression during autobiographical recall
We all remember what it was like to be young, when we were rock stars, Blues singers, invincible volleyball players, or marathon runners. We may also remember that specific marathon on a Tuesday in November where some particularly clever person put a billboard next to the finish line that said “turning back now would be […]
Eating dinner without checking your email: impulse control, time preference, and mobile device usage
How well would you do in the phone stacking game? In case you have not heard of it, it’s played during a dinner out and it goes as follows: at the beginning of the meal everyone puts their phone on a pile in the middle of the table. Like this: And then you start ordering drinks […]
You are looking at a display of 17 green blobs and one red blob. Your task is to find the red blob and press a key as soon as you have found it. What could be simpler than this visual search task? Its apparent simplicity notwithstanding, this task has opened a fascinating and sometimes complex window […]
Dictators are dictators but they are not all equally dictatorial—at least in the laboratory, when participants are given an amount of money to allocate between themselves and a recipient. In the classic dictator game, recipients are powerless and have to settle for whatever amount the “dictator” allocates to them. In sharp contrast to the expectations of […]
When looking at a tomato helps you touch a fire engine: Attentional processes cross effector boundaries Our attention guides our perception, memory, and action in intriguing ways. For example, 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 […]
William James famously said that the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” to an infant whose sensory apparatus is “assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once.” As adults, we are still assailed by all of the above, but somehow we manage to deal with the complexity of the world. We use […]
David Starr Jordan, the renowned ichthyologist and founding President of Stanford in 1891, was famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of fish. Names, classifications, habitats—everything was impeccably memorized and available for recall from the expert’s exquisite memory. Sadly, President Jordan proved unable to get to know the students at Stanford by name, as had been his […]
“You guys know an awful lot that could really benefit the public”—this is the motto of Lasting Learning (http://www.lastinglearning.com/), a start-up company run by Cameron Broumand, a former real estate man whom I interviewed recently about his vision for how Psychonomic knowledge can feature in a commercial enterprise. Cameron’s story starts with his experience as a […]