We have no difficulty picking “rat” as the odd one out from the set “goat – deer – rat”. This ready access to semantic structure in our memories supports many essential cognitive capabilities. It allows us to be guided in our current understanding and behavior by prior knowledge and experience. For example, if we learned […]
“During the summer of 1979, Bernard Pagano, a Catholic priest, was arrested and put on trial in Delaware for a series of armed robberies. Seven eyewitnesses, ranging from clerks to bystanders, positively identified Father Pagano as the “gentleman bandit,” whose well-tailored appearance and courteous manners always belied his felonious purpose. As the trial was nearing […]
Mavis has aged gracefully. With the beneficent smile of the ailurophile she exits the attorney’s office of Smith & Jones after signing her will, which bequeaths her estate to the local cat sanctuary. Mavis leaves behind a crisp $100 bill to pay for Mr. Smith’s services. A short while later, Mr. Smith discovers that the $100 bill […]
Government should be transparent. Science should be open. Government information belongs into the public domain, and scientific data should be publicly available to permit replication and scrutiny. Few would disagree with those calls for openness, and indeed there has been a flurry of activity within the sciences to upgrade research practices to achieve greater openness […]
It gives me great pleasure to introduce our new Digital Associate Editor, Dr. Steven Weisberg, who joined our team a few weeks ago. Steven is replacing Dr. Jason Finley, who had to leave our team for workload-related reasons. So, welcome Steven, great to have you on the team. I aim to gradually replace all Digital Associate […]
Most beings are social, and thus sensitive to the presence of others around them. Even cockroaches perform differently when they are being observed by other members of Blatta orientalis. In this respect, people are no different: we tend to perform simple tasks better when in the presence of other people. There is now a large body of evidence concerning […]
Chemists have test tubes and Bunsen burners. Astronomers have telescopes, computer scientists have computers, and psychologists and cognitive scientists have ANOVAs. If there is one tool that is being used across virtually all domains of psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, it is the Analysis of Variance or ANOVA. Somewhat ironically, ANOVA does not actually test […]
Hoffman and colleagues propose the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP), which asserts that perceptions evolved to render organisms sensitive to the objective world in terms of payoffs, or fitness functions, not truth. According to ITP, “…perception is about having kids, not seeing truth”, so evolution ensures that perceptual representations simplify an organism’s search for survival/reproduction-relevant dimensions. Accordingly, […]
Tomorrow, Monday 21st September 2015, a collection of papers will appear in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that are dedicated to the Interface Theory of Perception. The theory is proposed by Donald Hoffman, Manish Singh, and Chetan Prakash in a major article and is followed by a collection of scholarly comments and a reply to those comments by Hoffman […]
We all take speech for granted. We are able to say things to others without thinking about how we do that. We may struggle to know what to say when we are left speechless, but once we gather our thoughts, we can utter them without difficulty. Once you consider speech production more carefully, however, it reveals its full complexity. In […]