Having a star and seeing a non-existent triangle: Attention guides illusory contour formation

Clutter is a fact of life. Wherever you look, there is clutter. Even the tidiest of tidy rooms will contain much visual clutter: some objects will be in front of others, thereby partially obscuring them. So if you need to reach for the cup that’s behind the toaster, then your visual system must work through […]

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Ignoring is forever but attending dissipates: the time course of negative and positive priming

We are bombarded by stimuli almost every instant of every day. Even logging off Twitter provides only temporary relief before more information arrives that we have to deal with. Being able to inhibit unwanted responses to stimuli is therefore a critically important cognitive ability, and researchers have shown considerable interest in such inhibitory and control […]

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The early embrace beats later negativity: The neuroscience of appraising social and emotional relevance

Humans are social beings. This has numerous implications: For example, we know what others know or can know, and so we do not use gestures to communicate when we talk on the phone. We are sensitive to social norms, and we typically conform with those norms—even if they are communicated by a computer. We are […]

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More changes to the team: Good-bye Steve and Anja, and welcome Lisa

The Psychonomic Society will have a new Digital Content Editor from 1 January 2020 onward. But that’s not the only change of the team: There have been two resignations, and one new appointment to the position of Digital Associate Editor. I am sad to say good-bye to Steve Weisberg and Anja Jambrozik. And I am […]

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Handing over the Featured Content section: Welcome to Laura Mickes

My term as Digital Content Editor of the Psychonomic Society will come to an end on 31 December. The next day, I will start serving on the Society’s Governing Board. Building up the Featured Content section and running this blog has been an extremely enjoyable experience during the last 5 years. We ran our first […]

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#PSBigData: From Blocks Worlds via Bayes to Big Data

The goal of cognitive science is to understand how the mind works. It is a peculiar aspect of this quest that cognitive science often seems to be as much about computers and software as it is about the human mind: There is an intriguing parallelism between developments in computer science and affiliated fields on the […]

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Tracking down the bottleneck: The locus of the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP)

People often do multiple things at the same time. We can talk on the phone while stacking the dishwasher, and some university students seemingly know how to type messages on their cell phones while listening to a lecture. There are many occasions, however, when such multi-tasking breaks down or becomes dangerous. For example, notwithstanding how […]

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How accurate does the tortoise have to be to beat the hare?

Meet Amy, Rich, and George. They are participants in your study on the detectability of an English pea among a set of sugar snap pea distractors. All participants work diligently and quickly and yield the following results: Amy responds within 422 milliseconds on average, with an accuracy of around 88%. Rich is a little slower […]

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When Rain Man meets Braille: Tactile Subitizing and Numerosity Estimates

Put Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman together and you get Rain Man, the Academy-Award winning story of an autistic savant—played by Hoffman who received the Best Actor award for his performance—who turns out to have many unexpected talents. The clip below shows one famous scene, in which Hoffman knows within seconds that the waitress dropped […]

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#AS50: A brief conclusion with pointers to the articles

The #AS50 digital event concluded last week. The posts for this event coincided with the publication of a special issue of Memory & Cognition that celebrated the impact on cognitive science of a paper published by Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin in 1967. The paper, given the hashtag #AS50 for our event, reported […]

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