On the first of March, 1932, an intruder entered the New Jersey home of aviator Charles Lindbergh. The intruder used a ladder to enter the bedroom of little Charles Jr. and kidnapped the sleeping infant. A little over two months later, the baby’s body was found nearby. The intruder had left a ransom note on […]
It’s hot, very hot. And you are traipsing through the jungles of Sumatra in pursuit of that final bilingual participant who is as conversant in Minangkabau as she is in English. You need to test her in your lexical decision task to fulfil the sample size requirements of your OSF preregistration. You nervously scan the […]
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 continue to be assailed by stimuli, but out attentional apparatus permits us to deal with the blooming and buzzing confusion quite well. […]
If we want something, we tend to strive for it. With some combination of luck and skill, we sometimes achieve it. Goods such as a new car or a new house, positive life-changing events such as a new job or a promotion, are all within reach if we try hard enough. Or so said Horatio […]
Your brilliant PhD student ran an experiment last week that investigated whether chanting the words “unicorns, Brexit, fairies” repeatedly every morning before dawn raises people’s estimates of the likelihood that they will win the next lottery in comparison to a control group that instead chants “reality, reality, reality”. The manipulation seems to have worked, as […]
There are many ways to become famous. Phineas Gage, an American railway construction foreman in the mid-19th century, experienced one of the most improbable (and least recommended) paths to eternal fame. Few first-year psychology students around the world will have escaped the story of Phineas, and his mishap with an iron rod used to tamp […]
Is a picture necessarily worth a thousand words? Do bilinguals always find some grammatical features in their second language to be more difficult than native speakers of that language? Is the Stroop effect necessarily larger when the task is to name the color ink of a color word than when the task is to read […]
What is it we remember, and why? Research in cognitive psychology has provided a broad and often very reliable sketch of the variables that determine memory performance. For example, recall of words is better when word repetitions are spaced rather than massed. To learn the Lithuanian word for cookie, you are better off spreading apart […]
We all know what it means to play. We play badminton, we play with others, we are playfully exploring an environment…. Come to think of it, there is so much to playing, what does it mean to play? According to the Oxford English dictionary, the verb “play” has 7 different meanings, ranging from “Engaging in […]
The start of a Formula 1 Grand Prix is always exciting and adrenalin producing, even if you watch it on TV from thousands of miles away and keep the noise level below the pain threshold. (A Formula 1 cockpit is one of the loudest places on Earth.) Have a look at a start of a […]