In the past I’ve been accused of various forms of laziness—not taking advantage of a beautiful day, whiling away my childhood, not studying for my next test, whiling away my adolescence, not writing my dissertation, whiling away my 20s, 30s, etc.—when really I’ve been hard at work watching TV and movies. That the optimal method […]
Change Detection
Does Stanley Hudson, from The Office (US), sport a moustache? In an opener from the now-classic NBC sitcom, The Office (US), Dunder Mifflin staff members debate over whether their colleague has a moustache. The episode starts with the announcement that Stanley Hudson, a Black employee, is returning from his recent tonsillectomy, and his colleagues get […]
One recommendation to reduce COVID-19 transmission is to keep a distance of at least 2 meters/6 feet from others. If you are a pedestrian making your way through busy city streets, this advice is easier said than done. There’s a lot to keep track of to maintain distance with people coming from different directions and […]
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 […]
We have talked about pop-out before. The phenomenon is nearly self-explanatory: consider the two sets of dots in the figure below. There are 18 dots on the left and 150 on the right. In each array, there is a single red dot: what is your intuition about how long it would take to detect the […]
Hamburg, Germany, July 2017. The leaders of the 20 most powerful countries in the world gather at the G20 summit to discuss the issues facing our global society. The meeting was hosted by Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, and among the guests were President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The New Statesman reported the excitement […]
Cognition is so interesting that we might never realize it. Most of the time we don’t think about our cognition, although we are constantly thinking, seeing, attending, memorizing, and deciding during our waking hours. When teaching my first-year student “Intro to Cognitive Psychology”, the greatest joy for me stems from seeing their faces when they […]
How many things can we attend to simultaneously? Imagine being an air traffic controller and you are monitoring O’Hare arrivals on the day before Thanksgiving. How many aircraft can you attend to simultaneously? Or imagine watching a flock of grazing impalas in Krueger National Park or the Serengeti while a pride of lions is casually […]
You are in the cognitive laboratory and you focus on the screen in front of you. A few color patches are flashed for 1/10th of a second, and 2 seconds later another array of patches appears that stays on the screen until you respond. Your task is to decide whether any one of the patches […]
Have you stood in line at the Louvre in Paris to catch a glimpse of famous Mona Lisa’s smile? People say that besides her ambiguous smile, her gaze tends to follow you, which might add to the mysterious aura that has been created around her for centuries. There is a considerable body of evidence that […]