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 […]
In 1967, the average house in the U.S. cost $14,250, compared to an average annual income of $7,300. Gas was 33c a gallon and a new car cost $2,750 on average. Before you get too nostalgic, remember that at the same time 475,000 American troops served in Vietnam, and Muhammad Ali was stripped of his […]
YouTube is (in)famous for its cat videos. An estimate from 2015, now surely superseded by masses of additional material, located more than 2 million cat videos on YouTube that collectively have been watched 25,000,000,000 times. Even if you are not a cat aficionado, there is at least one video that is worth watching. It explains […]
Suppose you own Montana’s only candle-holder shop. Business is going well and you want to inspire your two employees, Fred and Giselle, to work even harder so you can open a franchise in Idaho. You decide to offer a performance bonus to your best employee, defined as the person who is most courteous to customers […]
Have you ever met anyone who dislikes magic tricks? No, me neither. Magicians and magic tricks seem to be universally appreciated in western culture. Whether it is at corporate events, kids’ birthday parties, or simply at the pub down the road, magic is fun and attracts an appreciative audience of all ages. One question that […]
The following guidelines were adopted in 2012 and were updated in 2019 by Alexander Etz, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Richard Morey. The guidelines have a permanent home here, but they are provided as a blogpost here to enable interested members to comment. The Psychonomic Society’s Publications Committee and Ethics Committee and the Editors-in-Chief of the Society’s […]
Statistical graphs are so ubiquitous and part of our daily work that we may forget how powerful they are. Since their invention by William Playfair a little over 200 years ago, graphs have become indispensable tools not just in science and business, but also in politics. Indeed, one of Playfair’s contributions was to draw attention […]
Cogito ergo sum. This famous utterance by René Descartes translates into “I think, therefore I am.” Thinking is what ostensibly makes us human—quite literally so because homo sapiens means “wise man”. But do we really think (much)? If we are so wise, how come fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook during the U.S. presidential […]
Roadie folklore has it that there are some towns in rural Texas or Saskatchewan that are so small, you miss them if you blink too long while cruising down some highway to nowhere. This is unlikely to be actually true, although figuratively speaking, I can think of a few rural towns in Western Australia that […]
Even beautiful minds take time to develop and mature. There is evidence that even an alleged child prodigy such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who started composing at age 5, required 10 years of practice to produce an outstanding piece of creativity. Alas, even beautiful minds will eventually turn from productivity to retirement, and no matter […]