Change Detection

Wait … Does Stanley have a moustache? I’d remember if we were from the same race

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 […]

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Spreading your attention divides your rate of conscious perception

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 […]

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The magic of cross-modal attentional entrainment

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 […]

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The sum of attention is more than its past: When memory and vision subtract

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 […]

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Vladimir Putin and the empty chair: Can people spot #Fakepictures?

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 […]

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When your own mother might be an invisible gorilla: long-term memory and change blindness

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 […]

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The hazard (functions) of detecting the pounce on the prey

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 […]

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Fortifying memory after encoding: Internal and external attention and visual short-term memory

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 […]

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