What’s the capital of Burkina Faso? Which bird can fly backwards? What was the first human invention to break the sound barrier? Questions of this type probe what is called “semantic memory”, the repository of our general knowledge, which is known to be organized by meaning rather than by autobiographical cues. For example, you may […]
Like many mental health professional, the UK’s famed National Health Service (NHS) notes that “it can be easy to rush through life without stopping to notice much. Paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you – can improve your mental wellbeing.” This ability to “live in […]
Who is an expert? Someone once suggested it’s “anyone who is more than 50 miles from home and is carrying a briefcase” or “someone who continually learns more and more about less and less”. The more somber but widely agreed definition in the cognitive community invokes reproducible superior performance in a particular domain. That is, an expert […]
As part of the Psychonomic Society’s efforts to upscale its digital presence, we are introducing a new service by enabling members to post links to online experiments on the Society’s webpage. The new facility will be given its own page, Online Studies for Members, and the guidelines governing the use of this page are as follows: […]
Suppose you are asked to name a few pictures. You are shown the drawing of a tiger and you say “tiger”. Then a mouse appears and you say “mouse”, and so on. The experimenter avoids pictures of a gerenuk or babirusa, so you are cruising along nicely. And then this pops up: The holiday is […]
You push the elevator button and you start waiting on the 4th Floor, in a rush to grab a sandwich before your lunch time is over. You wait. And you wait some more. At what point do you stop waiting and take the stairs? We make countless such decisions every day, where we need to predict […]
Imagine the following dystopian job: You are working in a factory, and your task is to look for that matching sock so the pair can be packaged together. To make things worse, you are given another sock every few seconds, together with a new drawer in which to look for its twin. To manage the […]
Much of civil aviation ultimately relies on the human perceptual system: Pilots must avoid each other by scanning the airspace around them and identifying aircraft that are in potential conflict. This is a skill that can be taught—and during the 15 years that I spent teaching people how to fly, there were a few basic ideas […]
The parable of the Blind men and an elephant, a group of blind men (or blindfolded people or people in complete darkness) touch an elephant to learn what it is they are facing. Each person feels a single part such as a leg or the trunk or a tusk. The “blind men” then compare notes and […]
Watching someone else feel pain is a painful experience. The ability to suffer not only your own pain but also that of others has “long been considered the distilled essence of our humanity” by some writers. Concern for the suffering of others has also been said to be central to moral decision making. Fortunately, this […]